Monthly Archives: April 2013

Robotics

Delta Project – Part II

1 Comment

In part one, I talked about what a Delta is and showed my 3D printed articulating Delta arm.  Since then I’ve created a frame to hold the arm and mount motors to it.

I used Adobe Illustrator to create the artwork for the top and bottom acrylic base pieces and brought the file over to SYN Shop for cutting.

Adobe Illustrator file for laser cutting the top of the Delta frame.
Adobe Illustrator file for laser cutting the top of the Delta frame.
Laser cut pieces and the delta frame ready for assembly.
Laser cut pieces and the delta frame ready for assembly.

I used threaded rods at each of the 6 hexagon corners to hold the top and bottom pieces together.

Assembled delta frame with arm hanging down.
Assembled delta frame with arm hanging down.
Assembled Delta frame.
Assembled Delta frame.

I used ViaCAD to create the mounting brackets for the servos and 3D printed them out.  I ended up doing five revisions to get it right.

The blue shows the servo mount. The yellow is the mock-up of the actual servo, which is not printed.
The blue shows the servo mount. The yellow is the mock-up of the actual servo.
Various revisions of the 3D printed servo mount.
Various revisions of the 3D printed servo mount.

 

During the process of adding the servo motors I had to re-cut the plastic top to get a better fit for the servos, but also added a few hundred holes in a grid pattern to allow mounting of the electronics as needed. I picked up three standard servos at Pololu.com.

The servos are mounted into the new brackets and there are steel wires attaching the servos to the armatures.
The servos are mounted into the new brackets and there are steel wires attaching the servos to the armatures.
The motors are in the mounts and attached to the Delta frame.
The motors are in the mounts and attached to the Delta frame.

Next I started adding the electronics.  I installed a Nymph board and a RobiCon connector fan-out board.

Added the Nymph, fan-out, joystick and potentiometer.
Added the Nymph and connector fan-out.

My next task was to write code.  My first goal was to just get the servos moving to make sure that the way I was driving the actuators was sane.  Here is the video below of the servos all being driven up and down in “thrust” mode.

Next time i will talk about the code that drives the Delta as well as more video showing the delta working.

 

 

Robotics

Delta Project – Part I

1 Comment

I’ve been fascinated by Delta-type robots for a few years.  I first saw one at the Java One conference around 2006. One of the research groups at Sun Labs bought one and ran it using real-time Java.  This particular Delta was a huge machine about the size of a refrigerator and designed for use as a factory robot for picking and sorting parts.  The engineers at Sun re-purposed it for drawing portraits.   They designed an application in Java that could take a photograph of a person, turn that image into vectors and then control the robot to draw that portrait on a piece of paper.   Was a pretty nifty demo!

The basic design of a Delta is pretty straightforward.  There are three levers or arms each controlled by a motor. The end of each arm has two parallel struts mounted on ball joints. The other ends of the struts all converge onto a end-effector.  The dual struts create adjusting parallelograms out of each lower arm section.  As a result, the end effector stays level with the bottom surface, yet allows the robot to move the effector in any X, Y and Z direction. Also a properly designed delta can move extremely fast.

My friend @Spetku likes to build her own Deltas which got me interested in taking a shot at building my own.   Here is some video of her delta in action:

Spetku was looking for better ways to 3D print the pieces and was pointing out to me that one of the most expensive components of the Delta were the ball joints.  Which got me thinking….   What if you could snap cheap ball bearings into 3D printed parts.  Would they have enough strength to not fly apart?

Spetku bought a bag of 250 ball bearings at McMaster-Carr and gave me a few.  I printed a few experimental joints to see how they might work (acutally these are Spekus joints since I seem to be pretty bad at taking picture of my own stuff, but you get the point):

IMG_0891 IMG_0890

They worked rather well.  So I began designing my Delta using viaCAD, an inexpensive AutoCAD clone.  After a few weeks of trial and error, my delta parts came together.  You can see in the photos below, the arms, struts and the end effector, where all the struts converge.

IMG_0048 IMG_0049 IMG_0046 IMG_0047

My next post will show how I made a frame to hold the delta and eventually drive it with some servos.

Read more about Speku’s Delta adventures here and here