3 years ago I started participating in the Grow Beyond Earth contest.  It’s a collaboration between NASA and the Fairchild Botanical Gardens in Florida.  The goal is to create a device that will grow food on the International Space Station.  That sounded like fun to me!  Year one focused on designing the growing area to take advantage of the 0G environment and fit in a 50cm cube.   I was fortunate enough to be a finalist and walked away with some prize money.  I was not able to participate in the 2nd year but I am back in for year 3. 

This year the focus is on creating a robotic harvesting and planting.  If you want to read all about it you can do so at the Make:Projects link below.  This has been a fun project and I learned so much.

https://makeprojects.com/project/0g-garden—year-3-professional-entry

Whew.  This project was a D-O-O-O-ZY!  We needed to enclose our giant industrial arm so he can’t run away and join the robot circus…

Well…maybe not for THAT reason, but when we start cutting stuff with this robot, we need to keep spectators out of his reach and make sure that if a cutting bit does break, it doesn’t go flying out into the shop and maim someone.

This entire project was the work of several people and really shows why the Milwaukee Makerspace is a great place to build stuff/hang out with friends/play with power tools, etc…

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Step 1: Design it!  I used Solidworks and modeled each and every piece of wood that went into this project.

Step 2: get the wood!  We made multiple trips to Home Depot, which thankfully is only 5 minutes away and we had great weather during the whole building process.  I love having a truck!  Fortune also shined upon me, as we had a new member join up right before I started this project, Jake R., and his help in building the wall was immeasurable.

Step 3: Bolt the wood to the floor so we know where to put the wall, and then build some framing!

Step 4: Put in the windows, drywall paneling and metal wainscoting.  We were very lucky to get seven pieces of slightly-smoked Lexan from one of our members, Jason H.  We also cut small holes in the ceiling tiles and ran 4 braces up to the metal ceiling trusses above.  This enclosure is ROCK-solid stable!  Thanks to Tony W. and Jim R. for helping with that!

When I went to Home Depot, I thought my truck could handle a 48″x 120″ sheet of drywall.  Not so much… one of their employees helped me split 10 sheets of drywall in half, in the parking lot…so I would later find out that I did not have drywall tall enough for the wall corner.  Hence the need for more “framing” so I could use smaller pieces.

The large cabinet that powers the robot arm is right next to the enclosure; I placed it outside to keep it away from foam & wood shavings.  However, we will need to have the programming pendant next to the machine every now and then….hence the need for 2 small pass-thru doors next to the cabinet.

I used doweling to help hold the door frame components together…..probably not needed, but it ensures a STRONG door!

Again, hooooray for the Makerspace and all its tools! We have several LONG pipe clamps that came in VERY handy for gluing the door frame pieces together.

Here’s the outside of the enclosure.  The big metal control cabinet will go right here, hence the framed “mouse hole” in the lower right corner so we can pass the cables through from the cabinet to the robot arm.

The same area viewed from inside the enclosure.

Here’s the ginormous sliding door.  It’s mounted on a barn-door track-rail and supported on the bottom by two custom-made wheel brackets.

Here’s how I made the wheel brackets.  I got two lawnmower-style wheels and bearings from Tom G., then Tom K. enlarged the center holes on the wheels on his Bridgeport mill so I could use bearings for smoother action.

I figured on four carriage bolts for a super-strong connection to the door frame.

This is the track and wheel bogies that hold the sliding door to the wall.

Bolting the brackets onto the door was “fun”…I forgot that the very bottom of the door framing is two horizontal pieces, so the very bottom bolt had to go.  ‘DOH!

Here’s the final, assembled view.  You can see the robot’s control cabinet in the lower right corner.

Now that the fabrication is complete, we’re working on decorative ideas for all that blank-looking drywall.

Whenever I look at this finished project it feels like to took several months to get it up, even though construction only lasted about 2-1/2 weeks.

Thanks to Jake R., Tom G., Tom K., Tony W., Jim R., and Bill W. for their assistance with this project!

The software chain I used to accomplish this was lengthy.  I designed all of these pieces in 3D in Solidworks, created a Solidworks 2D drawing, saved that as an AutoCAD drawing, brought that drawing into Vectric’s Aspire, then created machine code that the Makerspace CNC router used to cut the pieces from a sheet of foam.

Finally, once I was satisfied that everything would cut correctly, I switched to 3/4″ thick Baltic Birch plywood.  This is a “nicer” grade of plywood than the stuff that is used in day-to-day building construction work.  This wood is stronger by virtue of a greater number of plies, and it also looks nicer.  I happened to have a sheet left-over from a previous project, so it was all good!

Now we can take photos that aren’t a nightmere of shadows and hot spots!  Like this teaser photo of FIDO, shown below.  Stay tuned for more info on him!

We recently got an email from a guy who runs a manufacturing company in the Milwaukee area. He said he had some extra equipment he was looking to donate, including a welder, and some wire, and some scrap steel, and oh yeah, a Kuka KR 30 Industrial Robot!!!

We said, sure, we’ll come and pick it up. ;)

To be fair, he did mention it “needs work” but we’ve already assembled a team of members interested in getting this thing up and running. We’re hoping that with the varied experience our members possess, from electronics to industrial controls to robotics and general hacking and tinkering, we’ll get this thing swinging around in no time.

And what will we do with it? Well, besides the silly suggestions of arm wresting, can crushing, and free high-fives at the next Art Jamboree, there’s been talk of multi-axis milling, 3D printing, and hey, just being awesome with a giant industrial robot arm!

Before we even think of firing it up we’ll be mounting it securely to the floor and building a safety cage. The last thing we want to do is reduce our membership due to an “accident” with the giant industrial robot arm!

Of course, until it’s up and running, it’s available for amusing photo opportunities. ;)

During a recent trip to Baltimore I got to visit Baltimore Hackerspace, take a quick tour, and talk to two of their members.

Our story actually starts back in 2011, when I was passing through Baltimore and tried to connect with Baltimore Node (another hackerspace in Baltimore) and when I mentioned on their mailing list I’d be passing through town, I got an invite to stop by Baltimore Hackerspace, which at the time was called “Harford Hackerspace” and was located in one of the member’s garage. Well, I never made it to either space last year, so I thought I’d try again this year… sadly, Baltimore Node does not currently have a space due to some issues with Load of Fun, the building they are located in. (Side note: I snapped a photo of Load of Fun back in 2009, before I was even a Milwaukee Makerspace member.)

Confused yet? Good! Anyway, Mike from Baltimore Hackerspace was kind enough to meet me there on a Wednesday afternoon for a tour. We talked about Power Wheels, Make Magazine, The Red Bull Challenge, how Baltimore Hackerspace operates, how Milwaukee Makerspace operates, and general making and hacking activities.

I snapped a few photos as well… enjoy!

Baltimore Hackerspace was not easy to find! It’s in an industrial unit (which looks a little like a storage unit) with no sign on the door. I think some signage is in their future, as it’ll really help new visitors find the place.

Here’s their Power Wheels car. It looks unlike any other Power Wheels car I’ve seen. Like most Power Wheels cars, it occasionally starts on fire. :)

Here’s the “Telepresence Zen Garden” they built for the 2012 RedBull Creation Competition.

They had a robot game thingy, which was a little like Operation, but you had to guide a wand over the wire and not touch it, or the robot freaked out.

OK, this thing was impressive, and confusing. When I first saw this robot I assumed it was some commercially available unit, but it turned it was build using mostly scrap! Mark (the guy working on it) finds interesting pieces from children’s toys, household appliances, etc. and puts it all together. And, that weird thing to the right is indeed a walker, modified to assist the robot in walking, at least until it can walk on its own, without the help of a balancing mechanism. Great project!

There was also art to be found… I don’t know if this was done by a member, but it definitely added color to the space and let you know where you were. ;)

Some Space Invaders were descending down the wall… I hope they fill the whole wall with them, it would definitely look cool.

They had a small office for meetings, with a big table and chairs for hacking and what-not. The office also had this whiteboard, which may contain the secrets of the universe… or something.

What’s a hackerspace without a 3D printer? Here’s their MakerBot Thing-O-Matic ready to melt some plastic.

Looks like they’ve also got some music fans (and maybe video nerds?) as members. I love the color bars!

Well, that concludes our tour of Baltimore Hackerspace… if you’re ever in Charm City, check ’em out!

The plan was to take a “Roomba” robot vacuum cleaner that I got for $1.00 at a rummage sale, and covert it into the robot base for a giant spider or some other scary creature that could wander around at a Halloween party.

I started pulling screws out of the bottom to figure out how to remove the brushes and vacuum blower. It took some tinkering to figure out what I could and couldn’t remove and not cause a fault. In the end, it didn’t look like I could remove the blower motor and still have the thing run, so I simply removed the fan blades from the blower.

By that time, I was now thinking about video cameras and how easy it would be to run a 1/4-20 bolt right through the plastic. A bolt and two nuts quickly made a camera mount.

In the other room were some ping-pong balls, and I had a black sharpie. A little hot glue and Roomba-cam has some personality.

Look for Roomba-cam running around the Milwaukee Makerspace and please treat Roomba-cam nice – he is watching you and WILL upload to YouTube!

-Ben Nelson

We’ve got a number of robot builders at Milwaukee Makerspace, but we’re not the only robot-lovers in town… via Frankie’s blog, check out this video about Tom Consi and the robotics work he’s doing at UWM.

(We’ve seen some renewed interest in the Milwaukee Robotics Club recently, so we’ll probably start up regular meetings again in the next few months… that way everyone can show off what they’ve been working on.)

Initially I would have waived it off as using WiFi, or Ethernet, but work on another project (Marco) has illuminated several obstacles over multiple use cases (configuring Wi-Fi, closed networks, IP addresses); instead I think the approach will be to opt over USB (via Arduino Leonardo). I figure, if people will load up a coffee cup heater or foam missile launcher to USB, than there is no issue with port scarcity.

It’s not a lamp without light, and at some point OOMA will light up in either Android Blue, or iPhone Purple. Lighting the lamp will, however, have to relegated to a v.2 build, due to some complexity in the diffusion of light in such a cramped space. Additionally, I’d like to investigate EL panels to light it up.

Finally, I am coming up on the decision to be a DIY offering, or to design it to be marketable – do I build as a one off and just offer the blueprints to others or build an end-to-end consumer solution complete with potentially an NFC tag to tap and pair a user and their lamp.