hand building: progress so far

I guess pictures are worth a thousand words for this.

I am looking at this page in the Inmoov website to download and assemble the parts.

initial printing of parts:

shown above are some of the forearm parts and some palm parts.

the rest of the palm with some of the fingers, along with the forearm part glued together.

thankfully, these parts are designed to be printed in smaller parts and put together, which makes it possible to this to be printed with a small 3D printer like mine, which only allows for only 12cm x 12cm x 12cm (~5 inch x 5 inch x 5 inch) in print size. some parts had to be realigned in the model-slicing software in order to have it fit in the print boundary.

all the printing done so far.

you can see the inside of the forearm now has a servo bed, with more things needed to be printed and attached to the inside. I will need to get screws to attach them.

currently, the only big part missing the the last wrist part, which I am considering printing with another color (just got my order for blue filament today), since the instructions call for grease to be applied to that part.

really looking like a hand at this point!

Comments

duty cycle testing

Now that I saw a physical response, I should try to make it similar to how a servo should be controlled. Servos are actuators that receive (expect) position input (as opposed to motors, which receive speed/intensity input). Simply put, it registers input as pulses, decoding the ratio of high (a "on" signal) to low in a given period as a position value. A better explanation : http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-8-using-a-servo-motor/servo-motors As I am waiting for my servo to be shipped, I will continue to work with the LED light. As opposed to my previous setup of having the light turn on every time the request is given, I will have the light turn on and off in a regular pattern until a request is given, upon which the pattern will change for one "cycle" (on-and-off pair). The on-and-off logic (previously the LED control logic) will be run in a separate thread: def dCycle(*args): global dCVal ...

dabbling with android

I've been wanting to dabble with Android development recently, and yesterday I realized that there is a Socket.IO client API available for Java/Android. The API is pretty straightforward, so I loaded a test Android project I had made for going through Android basics and connected to the OpenSesame Node server. and it works! I mean, the interface is non-existent and it's really just bare-bones, but having the servo respond through an Android application was pretty refreshing. (the web client and the android client "communicating" with each other--messaging is pretty much for debugging purposes)

playing with servos

some servos that I had ordered were delivered. the instructions suggested another brand/model of servos, but these were a much more economical (cheap). I tried adding them to the hand: I'll have to print the "pulley" pieces that will be attached to the servos. meanwhile, I did somewhat (hackily) got the wrist to work, for now: you keep hearing the "usb plugged out" sound in the background, and that's because the servo was being powered by the arduino. the servo's power draw appears to be causing a shutdown of the device. will need a better power source for the servos. it feels like these pieces that are supposed to be plugged into the servo will have size issues.

the quest for robots

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