Introduction
Tomorrow Lab and DigiKey are back with a fresh, fun episode of Potentially Genius! Our guests this time are Jahnell Pereira from SparkFun and David Rogers from DEKA Research. They introduce us to the XRP Kit (Experiential Robotics Platform), which is a collaboration between a plethora of partners in creating what users wanted most out of a robotics kit. SparkFun was able to create “a complete comprehensive, open source robotics platform intended for beginners and classrooms,” explains Pereira. The kit is not just hardware, it’s also the coding environment and online curriculum that makes it stand out. Pereira and Rodgers gave Tomorrow Lab an open challenge of seeing what we could create using this brand new kit that shows off all its capabilities!
Image Courtesy of SparkFun Electronics
XRP to Rainbow Dominos
The Tomorrow Lab team got immediately to the brainstorming table and thought of making a throwing arm, having the robot take flight and even a tow truck for a stuck Roomba vacuum (now THAT is Potentially Genius!). They decided on an automatic domino layer, which allows the user to draw a line on the floor, have the robot follow that line and set dominos the same length apart for toppling. Ted Ullrich, one of Tomorrow Lab’s partners exclaims, “This concept leverages all the elements of the kit, while also creating a highly interactive and iterative experience between groups of users and the robot itself. And, who doesn’t love watching dominos topple?!”
After some quick sketching of the initial design, it was time for Dorian, Tomorrow Lab’s senior electrical engineer to order some additional components from DigiKey to get the ball…or dominos…rolling.
And Jason, also a Tomorrow Lab electrical engineer tackles the challenge of the robot being able to follow a line. Jason shows us the line following sensor on the bottom of the robot and explains that there are two pairs of reflective sensors and when the sensor is seeing what is next to the black line it will be able to tell it has more reflectants, helping to guide it. Jason tests thicknesses of lines and settles on the half inch line as the robot was the most steady with a wider path, allowing for less wiggling side to side.
Jesse, Tomorrow Lab’s senior industrial designer who also dabbles in the mechanical side, starts to think about the design for the mechanism that actually drops the dominos. Jesse wants the dominos in a vertical stack and a rotating wheel with a tooth on it that will release each domino one at a time, and then that will link to a pusher mechanism to actually place the domino. He and Pepin Gelardi, the other partner of Tomorrow Lab work together to 3D print and laser cut all the parts of the dropper.
Next on the electronic front, Dorian introduces more complicated curves and finds that the robot has trouble. He believes it due to using the motor drive’s “set-effort” function, and when switching to the “set-speed” function the robot has no trouble at all!
Pepin and Jesse, along with a guest appearance of one of Pepin’s kids 😀walks us through the parts of the dropper. The kicker kicks the dominos out of the stack, the cam drives an arm for the cam follower, the arm drives the pusher and the pusher pushes the dominos out the back. They fully assemble the dropper, of which my favorite part is the transparent holder for the dominos revealing quite the rainbow 🌈and test the mechanisms. After a bit of troubleshooting, as is expected when building any prototype, they attach the dropper to the line following robot. They discuss whether the dropper should be mounted right onto the robot or if the dropper should have wheels added for better mobility due to the fact that the motor is unable to handle all the weight of the dropper when fully loaded with dominos.
The robot struggled to place dominos accurately, but when Pepin moved the marker under the robot towards the front of the XRP platform, it led to the final decision to integrate the dropper right on top of the XRP chassis and add an extension to the dropper outlet – leading to success! Now this little robot can follow any whacky line and create quite the toppling experience!
The final prototype features a high capacity domino holder, buttons to manually start and stop the robot and it knows when to stop when it is running low on dominos. Rodgers shared with us that DEKA Research is currently working on an agriculture version of the XRP and our dropper got him thinking about how a robot could drop seeds over long distances. Pepin wants an XRP robot to pull up weeds in his garden – now don’t we all!
What a silly, amusing episode from Tomorrow Lab and our friends at SparkFun and DEKA Research! For more charming Potentially Genius episodes, check out Adafruit’s Clue Kit, Carla Diana’s Automated Crane Microphone and our very first episode featuring Danger Skates. 😀
And if you have an idea for a Potentially Genius invention you want to bring to life, drop us a line here to work together!
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