The Hexa-Bouncer Might Be The Most Overengineered Factor You See This Week
Sometimes, you wish to construct a easy challenge– the minimal viable product that solves your downside and nothing else. Other occasions you may be feeling slightly additional, and wish to use oodles of machined aluminum, six steppers, two cameras, a Teensy and a PC with a GPU simply to bounce a ball. That’s the temper behind [T-Kuhn]’s hexa-bouncer, a Stewart Platform on steroids. You can read all about it on his blog or witness it in motion in the video below. Trust us, actually need to see it in motion.
The six stepper motors linked to planetary gearboxes every drive an arm. Ingenious linkages permit the steppers to manage a ping-pong paddle in each axis of rotation and translation. A Teensy 4.0 coordinates these steppers, however the marching orders are coming from a PC the place a Unity utility — available on GitHub — is performing Inverse Kinematics utilizing the 2 cameras to trace the ball in 3D. You may think a GPU is useful there. Both the article and the video get into extra element on the IK.
As for the bodily construct, as acknowledged, it’s largely aluminum milled out on [T-Kuhn]’s CNC machine, and whereas the items aren’t really innumerable, he has to carve out 27 chunks of aluminum for every arm– plus all of the bits within the base. The whole rely is over 300. It’s a really spectacular robotic to do the very mundane job of ball bouncing, which makes it most likely probably the most overengineered factor we’ve seen this week. Kudos to [Tobias] for that!
Most of the other hexapods we’ve seen have been the wrong way up compared, however because the final metallic one was a horrifying man-carrying walker, we’ll forgive their misalignment. The computer vision workflow [T-Kuhn] is utilizing for ball monitoring is one he pioneered on his octo-bounce robotic, which we also covered.
Thanks to [Tobias] for the tip! If you’ve constructed one thing so amazingly over-the-top that family and friends query your sanity, bounce it into our tips line! We perceive.
