Andrew Burks

The second lab in my robotic manipulation class involves telling time with the 6-axis denso robot arms.  My lab partner Nico Paris and I decided we wanted to tell time by drawing lines on a white board and erasing them.

Instead of drawing numbers, we are drawing 9 equally spaced lines radially out from a point.  No line translates to “0” and some number of lines corresponds to that digit.  There are 6 of these sets of lines, corresponding to two hours digits, two minutes digits, and two seconds digits.

In order to draw and erase lines, I got to make a cool tool for the robot to hold.  By rotating its last joint by 90 degrees the robot can switch between the pen and eraser.  What’s even cooler is the spring built in to the pen part of the assembly to allow for some compliance without totally squishing the pen!

Here is a render of the tool, and a cross section to demonstrate the compliance in the pen.  Photos and video of the final product in action are forthcoming.  We demo the design on October 18th.

Design

After bouncing off of the vibraphone keys, the ball bearings need a soft place to land and a central basin to roll into.  The basic idea behind the design was to make an upside-down umbrella, with the skeleton on the outside.  Stretching 1/4” foam between sections of aluminum angle is a cheap way to cover a lot of area.

Ball collector

Ball collector basin skeleton

Incorporation into Full Model

While previous renders imagined the 180 pieces of acrylic supporting the keys to be red, clear acrylic being about 35% cheaper prompted a slight design change.  We should save about $100 by changing to 1/8” clear acrylic.

The full vibraphone is now 4.5 feet in diameter, and should be about 3.5 feet tall.  The rim of the basin is just 2 feet off the ground, which is good because want people to be able to look into the vibraphone.

Full Vibraphone (without recirculation screw and ball distribution)

Detail view of key unit/basin interaction

While I had made some preliminary designs of the Vibratron structure a few months ago, I can now begin to finalize some of the key support structure as the ball dispensing mechanism is finalized. 

Key Unit

Experimentation showed us that the ideal location of the ball dispenser is with the tube perfectly vertical, six inches above the center of a key tilted at 45 degrees.  A modular unit consisting of 4 pieces of lasercut plastic and a gate mechanism was designed to hold the keys and gates in their proper relative positions.

Key Unit Mounting

A large sheet of 1/4” thick aluminum will be waterjet into a shape that can hold 30 of these key units.  Each unit will be attached to the aluminum by two lasercut clips which are held down by cotter pins.

30 Key Units

With 30 key units on one large piece of aluminum, the weight of the entire assembly is already at 50 pounds with a diameter of over 3 feet.  In the future, the ball recirculation system (an Archimedes screw leading into a paintball hopper) will rise out from the middle of the aluminum circle, and the ball collection system (a foam floor to catch the balls) will stick out below and around the keys.

180 pieces of plastic, over 90 of them unique

There are 6 pieces of lasercut 1/8” red acrylic in each of the 30 key units.  3 of those 6 pieces are unique.  1 of the other 3 pieces has 6 different sizes, and the final 2 are each repeated in all 30 assemblies.

Obviously I did not want to model 98 different pieces of plastic and insert them individually into models.  Fortunately, design tables in SolidWorks are very powerful.  In the end, I only needed to make 5 plastic parts and 5 obnoxious Excel spreadsheets to get an assembly (“Key Unit”) with 30 unique configurations.  Some of the plastic parts even have their note engraved into the side!

The Carnegie Mellon Robotics Club has announced $500 in funding for HarmonicaBot!  This is good news, because there was no where else for funding to come from.  The one caveat is that I need to have a proof of concept in order to unlock the final $300 of funding.

During the presentation, some other interesting means of funding were mentioned.  It was recommended that I speak to Clippard directly to try and obtain my 12 solenoid valves for free or at a reduced price.  Also, an engineering professor at CMU who is very involved with harmonicas might be interested in doing something with this project.

Plug

In the hour before the funding presentation, I modeled and rendered a crude first iteration of the plug.  This version routes a 1×10 array of square holes on the harmonica to a 2×5 array of 1/8” NPT fittings on the back.  The harmonica sticks inside a bit, where two pieces of foam or rubber apply pressure to keep the harmonica up against the plug.

The next image is a cross-section of the plug.  The curved parts of the channel may seem to end before reaching the harmonica on the left, but they don’t.  Instead, one of them crosses out of plane towards you, and the other crosses out of plane into the screen.  This complex geometry is why the part needs to be 3D-printed or cast.