DiscoDroid
Rapid Prototyping/Physical Computing
Dr. Cheng Zhang
Group of 3
August 2023 - December 2023
Skills:
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CAD (Fusion 360)
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3D Printing/Rapid Prototyping
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Embedded Systems (ESP32-S3)
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Sensors, I2C, SPI
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Motors, motor driver, steppers, servos
Overview
We had to build something fun, functional, and creative. Previous projects had included a cheesecake 3D printer, a chess playing robot, and various mixology robots. There were also many different forms of digital art. Our group decided on building a robot which could dance to the beat of any song, inspired by the Big Billy Mouth Bass animatronics. The class covered as many topics in rapid prototyping and functional electronics as possible. We learned about rapid prototyping methods, such as laser cutting and 3D printing, as well as electronics such as analog/digital sensors, servos/stepper motor control, SPI/I2C, and applied them to our project. We presented our projects to young kids at the local science museum, Sciencenter in Ithaca.
Photo of our robot day before presentation
Design
Our robot consisted of a laser-cut acrylic body, a 32 x 32 LED matrix to animate the face, and two 3 degrees-of-freedom robotic arms with digital servos at the joints. While the arms did not have as many DoF as an actual human arm, we were still able to program them to perform dance moves. We also wanted to keep the physical design of the robot as simple as possible so we could focus on the code and ensure our robot could actually dance to the beat of a song.
Our robot was designed to move to a specific beat and dance to the beat of a song. It waits for a BPM input from our computer, which we sent over via Serial communication. Our original design had a laser-cut body combined with 3D printed arms, but we found that the 3D printed arms did not match the aesthetic of the body, took too long to prototype a lot of iterations due to the entire class using the same 3D printers, and did not increase the strength of the arms significantly. Thus, we decided to laser-cut the entire robot and really focused on optimizing the control algorithm to ensure the robot kept to the beat of the song.
