Projects!
Checkout this handful of projects including robot control using an accelerometer, outlet relay control, and a massive LED POV installation.
Ever have the need for a 3 meter spinning LED umbrella? Rare Angles was an Audio Visual device for Burning Man 2007. Consisting of a 4 meter tall 300 watt Bass Cannon, a PICAXE28x microcontroller, 10 LM4970 Audio LED drivers, and 30 RGB LEDs. When the pitch of the bass cannon was low, the LEDs shined blue, as the pitch increases the LEDs went from green to red as well as everything in between.
Watch how this tiny Spark Fun accelerometer can control a two-ton industrial robot.
Thanks for everyone?s feedback. I?ll address several comments with this response.
The economy & automotive industry has slowed down, so I?ve been spending some of my ?extra? time messing with some of my own robot projects. Yes, it is nice to have these cool toys to play with.
The delay could be greatly reduced, the accelerometer is very sensitive so I repeatedly sample the analog signal and average the values in the robot code to smooth out the response signal. Most of the delay is from the 100 samples being taken, I could rewrite that with a ?rolling? sample or use external filtering.
I actually didn?t spend much time on this, it was kinda a ?side-effect? of another concept I was testing to make the robot ?self-level? its tool. It is fun to play around with though.
Technically, I just wired the 2 analog signals into the robots I/O system. I scaled them (linear fit) so that volts correlates to degrees. Then the robot just runs a simple loop trying to match the rotation values (Xrot & Yrot) of the TCP (tool center point) to the scaled analog signals.
Great video. Would you mind sharing more of the technical aspects? I have access to a similar robot (Kuka brand) with a milling head attached to it. I thought it might be fun to go at a piece of styrofoam in this manner.
It's not quite a 'waldo', but you're getting there!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story)
I would love to try that with our paletising robots we use at work. The delay would be annoying but other than that it is a really cool demo.
If you could remove the delay it would have some very useful applications when it comes to job inspections, the operator could just hold a grip in free air and move it around to inspect work pieces quickly and easily!
It must be nice to have such COOL toys to play with! Totally cool, none the less.