32 - The One Where Vince Builds A Robotic Arm
Most of you know that I did an Electrical Engineering / Law double degree at Monash University...which promptly became kind of useless except now Mum gets to ask me every law question under the sun and 'Hey you're an engineer why don't you go fix the leak in the toilet?'
Great.
One of the things that engineering students do is a 'Final Year Project', or a capstone project, to essentially show they learned things in the last 4 years of their degree, and can prove to future employers that 'hey, I actually did something cool in university'. (Also, why don't other degrees do this? It gives people a bit more individuality in their course degrees and something to talk about).
My project was called 'AirGrip' - a robotic arm, controlled by an IR hand-tracking sensor called a 'Leap Motion' (which was sold to it's rival after it ran out of money), that could also provide haptic feedback to the user.
The Leap Motion was a new hand-tracking device that had come on to the market and was pretty innovative - look at this sick intro video! My supervisor wanted to see what could be done with it, and he wanted us to do it with as low a budget possible - so that we could show high school kids and other uni students 1. how easy it was to do these things and 2. COOL, RIGHT?
Three of us worked on the idea (the guy on the right is our supervisor) - we came up with an idea which used the Leap Motion as a 'controller' of a robotic arm, and added haptic (or touch) feedback, using a glove that the user could wear. It was a pretty janky thing to put together, but it was fairly interesting to do!
We scrounged around in the Electrical Engineering building for robotic arms - there was an old office that apparently a retired professor had stored all his junk in, and we found a perfectly serviceable arm called the Mentor Robotic Arm which has a 'bicep', a 'forearm' and a wrist that had a gripper.
The idea was that it was an educational resource - there was a control panel where you would send signals to different motors on the arm to move the arm, and I'm guessing that back in the day it was used show students how arms were controlled (?).
Instead, we gutted the wiring and re-wired the motors in the arms to an Arduino, where we wrote a bunch of software to essentially hook it up to the Leap Motion to use it as a controller. We went through a bunch of 3D printing successes and fails so make different types of 'hands' that could be attached to the arm. One time we printed a SOLID 3D hand that weighed like 3kg or something. Absolutely brilliant times - 'til we learnt about different infill (you can 3D print with different interior patterns that help make the design be more 'empty' and thus use less material...and it's lighter). It was almost comical how droopy the arm was when we tried to attach that hand to it LOL.
We built some sensors that attached to the hand so that you could 'sense' whether you were getting near an object - these IR sensors were incredibly finicky and would pick up so much random noise from the surrounding area that they nearly failed on our final demonstration. These were attached to some vibration motors on a glove that you would wear while controlling the hand; the system actually worked really well, albeit a little less sensitive than we wanted...(i.e. you had to get really close to the sensors before it would trigger).
Here's a video of it in action!
We brought this around to a bunch of different Monash University Open Days and Engineering Open Days to show off to the new, fresh engineering grads that we were makers, and tinkerers and 'LOOK HOW COOL - A ROBOTIC ARM'! (sometimes I think it was just a marketing ploy by our supervisor).
Anyway, I loved introducing it to people and showing them that they could make something just like this as well! It was a pleasure to see how magical such janky technology could be (though the software broke on multiple occasions while being demonstrated! - as you can see in the video above...).
One of my favourite memories from this experience was actually joining a 'Present Around The World' competition - where participants would share a presentation about an engineering project that they had done. We made a beautiful presentation using Prezi that jumped around and had a whole bunch of jokes - we made it to the National Finals but lost. I scored a free trip to Adelaide for it though! Very fun :)
That's all for this one - I think I've gone on a bit too long already! If you have any more questions about this feel free to reach out and ask...
Or just read the blog!
Chat soon :)
✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Make some cool shit with Arduino - Arduino is a small micro-controller that kickstarted the maker culture back up again. It's inexpensive and super easy to get going to code and tinker with things. I think it's a great thing to know how to do some basic coding - don't let computer systems control your life in the future! You should know the basic language and paradigms to deal with coding issues around you, otherwise the robots will win! :O
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Ready Player One (book) - a case where the story of the book is better, but the visuals bring it better to life in the movie. A world where everyone is jacked into OASIS, a virtual reality where a puzzle is left for literally everyone in the world to find and inherit billions. It's kinda like Willy Wonka leaving his chocolate factory behind, but as if he was dead and left a bunch of clues all around the place. Also it's a dystopian future where the teenage protagonist has to fight the evil corporation that is trying to take over the world. Original. But packed full of nostalgia for the 90s which is kinda nice.
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Elon's plan to build a rocket per week - a fascinating piece of writing about Elon that reminded me of his biography. His drive to make humanity a space-faring species is incredibly forward-thinking and visionary, but his treatment of people leaves a lot to be desired. Will it be worth it in the future?
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How to be a Centaur - highly recommended post about how AI should be augmenting our intelligence rather than replacing it. Charts a course through history about how we've always had man-machine hybrids to solve problems, through the lens of chess.
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A summary of gears - really great animations and breakdown of how gears work. There are a whole lot of interactive sliders that let you control speeds of gears, gear size, teeth radius etc. Ever want to know anything about gears? Look no further!
🌱 The Calathea Corner
It's hard to come up with unique perspectives of Feleafcia - I might retire this section of the newsletter soon, unless something interesting happens - what do you guys reckon?
This time I'm going for a 'you're in a deep dark forest with massive leafy structures' but I don't know how successful it is...
