I would share here my project 'ZENrobot online'
InWords:
"In contrast to the digital revolution, ZENrobot paints his circles very slowly. It's a kind of meditation watching this robot scratching his waves, circles and spirals in sand. This process can take up to 40 minutes, depending on the complexity of the pattern."
http://keinkunst.ch/zen/
2015 this scara robot was learning project for me. I was wondering how calculate the 2 angles (inverse kinematic) for a scara robot arm from cartesian coordinates data. Many hours with google and testing until i get the right positions. I was surprised about the accuracy from the robot arm after i spend him a pen and a white sheet of paper.
Inspired from Bruce Shapiro and his 'Sisyphus' http://www.taomc.com i saw in a ehebition, i add to my ZENrobot a sand bed and a ball pen refill with a micro servo for the Z axis. Because i dident now about GCode at this time i had written the arduino code by myself. And the communication between processing and arduino is slow. Each step is done the arduino gives a feedback and processing can calculate the next (sub)step. 2day i would use GCode. Done in a smal version with 2 old CDROM sliders.
Another big challenge for me was calculating path moving between now and next position instead point to point moving. Google helps all the time...
Now 3 years later, a nice movie was done and the misssed chance put the robot in a exhebition i realised the online streaming project i had long time in my head. Again lot to learn about html, php, javascript and raspberry Pi, streaming, firewalls .... Success!
Technical description:
- The lightly modyfied robot arm comes from a kickstarter project
- Processing www.processing.org does the calculations for the patterns (first on my macbook; actually on a raspberry Pi 3)
- Arduino UNO get the angles from processing and does run the the stepper motors and the micro servo (actually one stepper is broken and does little jumps. need fix that)
- Raspberry Pi3 running the webcam; generates the stream to youtube and turn on/off lights; communicate with the webserver and finally generates the patterns
The movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmK1j-XQyCw
The real time interactive stream in a BETA version: http://keinkunst.ch/zen/
Pinaut )°(