Video of Episode 2 of Portuguese Makers Hangouts

Hi everyone :)

As I said in my last post, I have been invited to participate in Episode 2 of the Portuguese Makers Hangouts. It was on the 21st of May at 22:00 (Lisbon time). In case you weren't able to watch it  live, here's the full hangout. It's in portuguese but you'll still be able to see the projects that were shown. I hope you like it! :) .


Take care! :)

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Portuguese Makers Hangout - Episode 2

Hi! :)

Recently I've been invited to participate in Episode 2 of the Portuguese Makers Hangouts. Quoting from  the webpage, "the purpose of these Hangouts is to gather the Portuguese Makers and get the world to know about their talents and their projects". They are used to share experiences and create contents around the best of the DIY/Make scene in our country.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

From 3 to 5 participants are invited for each hangout and their goal is to show the audience their creations, talk about the problems and challenges they had while building them and their lessons learned. Live demos are usually provided :).
Anything that mixes creativity and art with technology counts. A robot, a quadcopter, a cool gadget, a 3D printer, a new technique or material, anything that comes out of the inventor's obsession to create things will do.
All the hangouts are recorded, saved, and made available on as many channels as possible. Currently, the Portuguese Makers Community is aiming to do an Hangout every month, but this might change (for the best).
In this hangout I'll be showing and talking about my homemade CNCs, specially TheMaker2, and some robotics stuff.
In this hangout there will also be participating the Portuguese Makers Nuno Correia showing his printrbot and João Frazão showing Ziphius (that recently won the Engadget's Insert Coin contest) and some other projects.

The live feed will begin on the 21st of May, at 22:00 Lisbon Time. You can confirm your attendance to the event here on G+. Share this event with everyone that may be interested :).
If you wish, you can see the 1st Episode of the Portuguese Makers Hangout here.
You can also join the Portuguese Makers community here.

Take care! :)

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High torque encoded DC motors for robots from car window motors

Hi! As I mentioned in my latest post on how to make Tiny Encoders for DC Motors, some time ago I went to a junkyard to salvage two powerful high torque DC motors from car window lifting systems to use in a robot. I had to take my own tools and dismantle the doors from an old Renault Laguna myself  to get the motors and then managed to negotiate with the seller to buy both motors for 25€, which I think was quite cheap.

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Tiny Encoders for DC motors

Hi again! Today I'll show you a small part of a project that I did a long time ago and, due to some changes of plans I didn't end up using. Anyway, maybe this small project might come up handy for you.
Some time ago I went to a junkyard to salvage two powerful high torque DC motors from car window lifting systems to use in a robot and had to make some encoders to put in them. The space where I could put them was really small so I had to find really small sensors and design a PCB for them in Kicad.
The sensors that I used were Vishay's TCUT1300 IR Transmissive Sensor with photo-transistor output. Following the sensor's datasheet I designed a small board (10x8mm) that would fit in the space that I had available.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

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Cheap Ball Casters for Small Robots

Hello everyone! :) In the title of this blog I mention that it is also about robotics. However, and to be honest, I've realized that I haven't posted much stuff about it. I hope to fix that in the following posts since recently I've finally finished some robot projects that I have been doing in the past months. Unfortunately I can't publish them yet. Maybe in a month or two :) Anyway, I'll start with a simple post regarding a simple but very useful part for small robots: ball casters!

You can buy ball casters from several robotics shops online and they're not the most expensive thing on earth. However, there are other options that can be cheaper and will save you from the waiting until you receive the ball casters that you may order from shops online. Some of the options fit in the spirit of Green Robotics, which is the idea of reusing and recycling everyday things to make robots. I'm going to show you three options that may suit your needs :) .

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I'll start with the option that I think to be the best of the three that I'm going to talk about. See the shiny metal balls stuck in a white plastic piece? They look really good, don't they? :)

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Experimenting with vacuum molding

Hi there! This post is about a really simple way of making plastic parts for your projects. Have you ever heard of vacuum molding? It's a method to make a plastic mold of a piece by using heat and suction from a vacuum cleaner. You can easily replicate what I'm going to show you. You just need some wooden pieces to make a box like the one you'll see in the picture, a vacuum cleaner, a heat gun/electric heater/oven and some disposable plastic dishes.

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State of the Art in Intelligent Humanoid Robotics

Hi! This will not be my typical kind of post. I usually post about projects, tutorials, publications, etc. but this time I'm just going to share a video that shows the state of the art towards the development of Intelligent Humanoid Robotics. It's a great video and shows some of the great research that has been done with the iCub robot. I'm not just sharing a video because I'm being lazy, I'm sharing it because it shows the awesome work that has been done with an awesome robot and it deserves to be shared. This is not science fiction. This is reality! :) I'm sure you'll like it! :)

Take care! :)

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CNC Controller Board v2

As I said previously, I have been slowly developing my second CNC Machine, TheMaker2. To control the new CNC machine I developed a new board based on a PIC16LF877A since the L297's that I used on the first CNC controller board that I designed can be quite expensive here in Portugal and I had some PIC16LF877A samples lying around that with a few programming lines could do the same or even more than three L297 stepper motor controllers.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

Once again, the board design can be split in three parts:

1. Isolation - it has Vishay's CNY17-2 optocouplers to isolate the parallel port from the rest of the circuit;
2. Driver - a Microchips' PIC16LF877A drives three stepper motors in unipolar mode (if you prefer bipolar you can change the schematics and boards at your will);
3. Power Interface - a bunch of Vishay's SUP85N03 N channel FETs working as switches controlled by the PIC16LF877A.

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Homemade CNC: TheMaker2

Hi! As I previously said in my first post about my first Homemade CNC: TheMaker1, I was slowly developing a bigger, faster (didn't accomplish this part yet) and more robust CNC. Well, the development phase has finally come to an end and it is finally ready! :D In order to build a more rigid structure I decided not to build it with a moving gantry, but with a moving table on x axis and a fixed structure for y axis, which holds z axis. The build is based on this one.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

One of the main objectives was to make it low cost and believe it or not, with some scavenging involved I managed to build the whole structure with only 84.4€! :D Oh, and this cost still includes some spare materials! :P

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Adding an external power supply to a cheap USB hub

Hi again! In this post I'm going to show you how to add an external power supply to a cheap USB hub. :)

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I've been running some experiments with two Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Pro and the Raspberry Pi and unfortunately I haven't been getting any good results. I can't get many fps and some of the captured frames contain corrupted data but I think I may have found out the reason for that. After some reading I verified that the USB ports of the Raspberry Pi can only source 100mA to a device and maybe the cameras are consuming more than that. To bypass that problem I went out to buy a USB hub with external power supply.

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New Publication: Minimalistic Vision-based Cognitive SLAM

Hi! There is a new paper in the Publications section entitled "Minimalistic Vision-based Cognitive SLAM" which was presented today at ICAART 2012 - 4th Int. Conf. on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, in the Special Session on Intelligent Robotics. You can download it in the Publications section or just click here.

Below you can see the presentation that was used. Hope you like it :)

Minimalistic Vision-based Cognitive SLAM on Prezi

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Another Interview at RUA FM

Hi! In November, 9th, I posted about an interview (Interview at RUA FM) that I gave to RUA FM radio station about my team's participation in the European BEST Engineering Competition, in Istanbul. Once again, I was invited for another short talk, this time about Cognitive Robotics, which will be on air during this week. You can listen to the interview below or download it here. Again, the interview is in portuguese, so you must know portuguese (or learn it :P) to understand it. I hope you enjoy it. You can also check some other interviews and interesting talks from the professors and students of the elctronics engineering department of the University of the Algarve here (all in portuguese).

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