Awesome things you can do with your Arduino driven robot:

1. Connect it to the internet, get visual feedback from it, and control it through your computer or phone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsvqQ5h7QMY&feature=player_embedded

2. Attach a Wii nunchuck to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlukl5fLi7s&feature=player_embedded

3. Or make it remote controlled.

4. Make your robot detect obstacles and change its trajectory based on them by adding wire “whiskers” or an IR/distance sensor to your robot.

Learn how to get started at the Intro to Arduino workshop, Tuesday September 27th, 7-9 PM (repeated every month).

6:23 pm  •  25 September 2011 by plamena-at-metrix   •  view comments

Making your very own servo robot is only a workshop away. Did you always want to make awesome things with microcontrollers but thought it might be too complicated or didn’t know where to start? No idea what a microcontroller does but like the shiny robot in the picture?

Come to the Intro to Arduino workshop, Tuesday, September 27th, 7-9 PM.

You’ll get your very own Arduino board and all the instruction you need to make your very own programmable robot.

Think this might be too complicated? Check out the simple parts list for the robot. You can get most of them from your local hardware store:

Best part about taking our workshop: We have a laser cutter and all kinds of fancy acrylic so you can make super snazzy custom parts for your robot.

Are you a great programmer but are intimidated by the electronics part? Don’t be! You can create robots and other projects with very basic electronics and no need for soldering.

Does the programming part of this seem scary? We will help you get started. Only minimal programming is needed to make your robot go.

Stay tuned for ways you can expand your robot’s capabilities.

This project was borrowed from oomlout on Instructables http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-an-Arduino-Controlled-Servo-Robot-SER/

8:22 pm  •  14 September 2011 by plamena-at-metrix   •  view comments

Want to know how to turn this:

into your very own cool light fixture…

or a super sneaky spy robot?

Come to the Basic Electronics workshop, Tuesday, September 20th, 7-9 PM. 

You’ll get the foundation in electronics that will get you started on your path to all kinds of awesome projects. With a few basic, cheap components you can create the beautiful light fixture above or start making that cool robot you always wished you had so that you wouldn’t have to dress yourself in the morning. 

The workshop will go over a number of basic electronics concepts through hands on projects and circuit building. We’ll provide the materials, you just need to bring you awesome ideas.

7:26 pm  •  14 September 2011 by plamena-at-metrix   •  view comments

Dangerous Prototypes just announced their Open 7400 Logic Competition, and it just so happens that Metrix Create:Space has recently acquired more logic than Vulcan.

We’ve been sorting and cataloging what we have over the past week and putting it on the LogicCounter wiki page.   

Are you working on a project?  Do you want to win prizes and fame on the Internets? Come on down and make something awesome!

10:59 pm  •  2 September 2011 by mattw-at-metrix   •  view comments

Come to our October Makeshop on stuffed animal surgery! We will provide you with the raw materials to create a complex recreated animal with lights and noise, and you will go home with an awesome modded plush!

You are also welcome to take on one of our advanced projects (hack a Furby!) and/or plan making your own electronics (noise/sound/lights).

Your Makeshop catalyst has interned at Mimi’s Monster Mashes http://mashmonsters.livejournal.com and has made a number of sound-and-light modified animules! 

Mod Your Plush Makeshop

Thursday October 6th 7pm to 9pm

Metrix 623A Broadway East  Seattle WA 98102

$25 with all materials, guidance, and inspiration included!

5:30 pm  •  2 September 2011 by snouted   •  view comments

Another exciting Intro to Electronics workshop is coming up in a week. It’s perfect both for total beginners as well as those who need an electronics refresher. We will be going over the basics needed to understand how a circuit operates at its simplest level. We’ll be covering voltage vs. current, resistors, capacitors, microcontrollers. Through a series of quick LED projects the workshop teaches the use of these elements as well as how to build circuits from schematic drawings and troubleshoot them. The workshop will equip you with the basics to develop your own, much more complex and fun electronics systems. The possibilities for awesomeness are infinite!!

9:31 pm  •  16 August 2011 by plamena-at-metrix   •  view comments

Arduino is a great platform for creating awesome projects both small and large in scale and varying in complexity. It pairs a board packed with fun components and an open source programming software. The board integrates a microcontroller with a set of inputs and outputs. The inputs can be as simple as a button or a switch or as fancy as real time streaming data. The outputs can be motors that make things move or anything else that you might dream up. Check out the Arduino website for downloading the software and learning more about what this tool offers.

http://arduino.cc/

The Intro to Arduino Workshop offers a place for complete beginners as well as those with a bit more experience with electronics and programming. Through a set of quick, hands on projects, we will be going over the basics of the Arduino Uno board and the programming platform. The workshop will set you up with a nice foundation to start creating your own exciting projects, from home monitoring systems to robots that make things happen to flashy lighting designs. We’ll provide the knowledge, you bring the inspiration!

6:22 am  •  16 August 2011 by plamena-at-metrix   •  view comments

Arduino is an open source prototyping platform.  It combines a microcontroller (computer brain) with input and output ports to enable virtually any project.

Example projects range from playful, like LED cubes, to practical, like a mouse trap!

Two workshops will be held on Sunday: Intro to Arduino from 2-4 pm, and Arduino Programming from 5-7 pm.  The Intro to Arduino workshop will cover the basics of what an arduino is, how it works, and gets you started controlling the world around you (and making lights blink and stuff). An arduino functions like a tiny computer. You give it commands (by programming it) and it executes them one at a time.  Only the most basic programming is covered in this workshop.

Arduino Programming goes into more depth about how to get the arduino to do what you want.  One of the functions we’ll talk about is the “if” statement.  ”If” statements tell the arduino to evaluate an expression (i.e. is the value on input0 greater than 512, etc) and do separate things based on whether that statement is true or false.  You can put lots of these in a row (nested “if” statements) to evaluate several possible states (i.e. if input0 < 100 -> do X, if input0 < 200 -> do Y, etc).  ”If” statements are one of the fundamental logic statements that are useful to control your arduino.

Taking both workshops will give you the biggest headstart into doing awesome projects with your arduino.

11:18 pm  •  17 July 2011 by lklafleur   •  view comments

Late last night, we had our first print on the big robot. This robot eats chipped HDPE milk jugs (the plastic ones, clear and opaque both) and extrudes them a lot like a big RepRap. We’ve been working on it for a few months now.

The nucleus of the machine is a CNC router table, a DynaCNC 1000. The company is out of business, as you might notice from the website, but they were located in Monroe, Wash.

The CNC table is controlled by a piece of software called Mach3, which is a more or less generic robot control software thing. It’s got a million or so knobs. Kind of like Skeinforge but these buttons move the actual robot. The DynaCNC folks wrote some custom VBscript code to tell Mach3 how to talk to their special hardware.

We built an extruder head and mounted it in place of the router that the table came with. It’s a simple design, mostly just a scaled-up version of a standard RepRap print head. The major parts came from Home Depot: about 1 foot length of 1” (inside diameter) steel pipe threaded on both ends, a round-end pipe cap, and a pipe-end-to-flat-surface adapter. Inside the black cylinder is a length of heater cord wound tightly around the pipe; you can see it spiraling out to give the top of the barrel a bit of a thermal gradient. The black cylinder is a bit of aluminum tubing from a projector mount that we had lying around, filled with fire cement. There’s a thermistor in there too. This extruder has a lot of thermal mass. It takes about an hour to heat up to the 180-190 Celsius we print at.

The adapter bracket thing is bolted to a custom-cast part. We plaster printed an original, made a silicone negative, and cast a positive with Smooth-On TASK 8. We cast some long bolts right into the part so we wouldn’t have to worry about them coming loose.

The extruder is mounted on a frame which then bolts to the robot head, so that we can remove it in one piece as necessary. This way we can reattach the original cutting head.

To drive plastic into and through the head, we got an augur from Home Depot and chucked it into a Harbor Freight 1hp drill which is bolted to the frame. This drill is powered through the spindle relay on the router table, so it’s under software control. We can’t make it go backwards, but I don’t think anti-ooze retraction would be very useful on a head this big!

The nozzle is 6mm across but the extruded material is about 8-10mm thick due to relaxation. We were running the head across the bed at about 1 centimeter/second, which looks like it may be too fast for stacked layers.

To get that wonderful blend of chipped HDPE you see on the right, we sliced and shredded a bunch of (cleaned) plastic milk jugs. The shredder, named TARNATOR by its manufacturer, is a West German model that is more than happy to eat most anything. It will eat a milk jug that’s been sliced open. With a little persuasion, it even chunks right through the screw threads on the top. TARNATOR gives us ribbons of HDPE about 4mm across (3.8mm according to the nameplate), which we then shred a second time to get chips. We’re investigating using a blender to chip the ribbons instead.

The augur chip feed needs babysitting to prevent it starving, even when the hopper is full. Unexpectedly, the drill makes angry stressed robot sounds when it’s nice and full, and happy unloaded motor sounds when the augur isn’t feeding well. We also had some problems with the temperature dropping below the melting point last night, which made the motor singularly angry.

The whole purpose of this exercise is to print a boat. What should we make next? Comment below if you have an awesome idea!

6:36 pm  •  7 July 2011 by chronomex   •  view comments

What do you do when the electronics kit you want to buy is more than you’d like to pay, or doesn’t have the right mix of features? Stop by Metrix and create your own of course! I recently spoke with Logan Bowers about his plans for creating and selling his own electronics package to work with the Clondels- also being made at Metrix.

Read More

12:26 am  •  7 July 2011 by allisonatmetrix   •  view comments