Engineer Zero

Isn’t it adorable? On the left, you have hammerbot creating a pile of ore chippings at the base of the cave wall. Then on the right is shovelbot, carrying the ore chippings to a wagon. Observant viewers will notice that the scene has been horizontally flipped because I collaged the picture the other way, then realized I wanted it to read the activity left to right.

Anyhow, I’m not done with the mining bot zoo. I’m thinking there should be a transbot. This is not a bot that dresses differently, but rather a transport vehicle that will haul the ore wagons in and out. We’ll see.

Then there should be a helperbot, which will do things like swap batteries, provide basic maintenance, and even tow defunct bots back outside. If a robot breaks down, we’re not sending other people in to fix it, we’re sending in another robot. That’s what helperbot is for. Coming.

You need a robot to pick up after hammerbot, and that’s shovelbot. The shovel is a bit small and the camera is a bit large, and also I’d like the camera mount to tilt down enough to see what gets scooped into the shovel. Then shouldn’t the shovel have some kind of tilt mechanism so that it can dump its load into wagons?

Well, the reason you make these graphics is to see the problems before you go to the expense of actually building the thing.

1. I used MS Paint for the background, thus the jaggies. I think there might be a way to minimize them by changing the background in sketchup, we shall see.

2. I would like to show the lamp beam, but Paint doesn’t support transparency or that alpha channel stuff.

3. I still need to move the wagon out from the front and park it somewhere near.

4. I need to make a shovelbot.

This sundial link is copied from makezine, it has to do with inputting a location and out comes a printout of a sundial for that location. I’m putting the link here because I have a project in mind for this. We’ll talk later.

This one I call ‘Hammerbot.’ It uses a pneumatic-powered hammer to chisel into rock. Originally, I had the idea that the broken rock would then fall into the wagon that the robot is pushing in front. Then I realized that there are many reasons why that won’t work, most of all because the poor little robot’s arm isn’t long enough to reach over the wagon.

So now the idea is that it’s pushing this wagon, yes, but it detaches when it goes to hammer on the wall. Another robot or some other kind of attachment is used to collect the chiseled rock that falls at the base of the wall. I’ll work on that concept some more.

Anyhow, in light of the trapped Chilean miners, maybe soon they’ll stay topside and teleoperate robots instead of having to risk their lives.

Toying with an idea to make a google sketchup set of furniture for interior decoration of shipping containers.

I was visiting the make magazine site and I saw a link to a blog called The Inventive Mind. Notice the D-shaft? I took that as a challenge for Sketchup and drew this:

What I’d like to do is blur the line between virtual reality and material reality with a 3D printing system. Of course, Sketchup really isn’t optimal for that. Blender is probably closer. In that regard, learning Blender is on my list of things to do next month. Seeing that my sketchup skills are now adequate for rough drawings.

I hesitate to call this an ‘old fashioned’ TV set, because this is what I grew up with. This is, in fact, a rough approximation of what I watched the original Star Trek on when it was first broadcast. The control panel wasn’t yellow, though, but I don’t remember what it was, so yellow it is.

I would have liked to have been able to make some sloped surfaces here, and the antenna assembly would have looked cooler with a dome. Anyhow, something I slapped together. Discuss among yourselves: The Industrial Revolution was neither industrial, nor a revolution.

Well, the previous cup was lame, so this one is even lamer. I’m not even sure how you drink out of this. The proportions seem such that in order to get your fingers into the handle, the cup itself would have to be about the size of a jello mold.

Jello mold . . . hmm.