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Well,
in case you did wonder, why you haven't
seen any new and amazing jewellery pieces from me
lately, here is the answer:
:
six legged (or hexapod) walker robot
I
spent the 3 northern summer month in Los
Angeles working on a music project with
Genevieve and a new
Didgeridoo track. I also caught up with
an old friend of mine from Berlin.
Marcus Fink is now working with his
company Subsonic Steel for the
Hollywood film industry. His animated
creatures have been used in music clips
and horror movies!
High polished "Hollywood Version"
On
of his latest creations, the completely
autarkic ant robot was waiting for its
brains when I arrived in his amazing
work shop. All pieces had been cut from
sheet aluminium on his in-house cnc-cutting
machine.
 In
two weeks an ATMEL AVR Mega8
micro controller had been mounted and
controlled the 12 servo motors moving
the six legs.
The servos are of-the-shelf model craft
items. Pulse width modulated signals; if
you need to know.
This amazing chip family
is capable of running up to 32 servos
without any additional electronic
devices. Just plug the servo to a pin,
add the 5V voltage and of you go. Plus
a little bit of programming that is! I
wrote the software in AVR-assembler
using only the free Atmel Studio4
without the need of a programming board.
The chip's program can be updated by
directly accessing the programming pins
say from your printer port. (ISP) |
![Ant-Robot video clip]()
5MByte .AVI video clip of moving
ant
My
time in LA was up before I could finish
the Infra Red tele-control reception
using a household TV-control. In
September I was working as head
mechanist for a theatre production at
the Acropolis in Athens.
Back
in Berlin Mathias Lau was so kind
to let me finish the project on his
ant-robot. Currently possible is the
IR-tele-control of 9 moving styles and
speed control.
"Berlin Ant"
Amazing
to see, that everyone seems to have
his/her idea for extensions. Improving
mechanics or adding claws or a scorpion
tail, a moving head with solar panel and
battery charger, search patterns on the
PC; to name just a few!
And
there is space for all of that. The
mechanics can be build in short time
from Subsonic Steel in LA, the software
is fully documented by me and the chips
tutorials are available for free from
ATMEL's homepage
http://www.atmel.com Forget this
Japanese doggy! You learn its tricks and
that's it. Here you can really teach new
moves.
To
place your order for your personal
Ant-Robot pet or for software inquiries please
contact me at:
(please type into your mail application)
For a demonstration in the LA area
contact Subsonic Steel at
chromekraut@yahoo.com |
presents:
