October 2014

Jelly

jellyBot : Racky All in one Piece

This weekend I started printing the newly redesigned pieces for my jellyfish robot. I got about 90% finished by Sunday, but not enough was intact to start testing out whether or not the design will move like it should. Yesterday, I scraped together the short end pieces leftover from old roles of filament to finish printing the rest of the tiny arms for Racky. Now that I’ve added a slight curve to the length in addition to the U joint at one end, it was a pain deciding how to print the piece without ended up with a pile of pelvic fur. I had to position it rocketing off the build plate with some support material, which had a 50% success rate, (which sucked as I was nearly out of yellow). In spite of the failed attempts, I got them all done… just in the knick of filament : Once these small arms were added to the body, I needed to come up with a…

Jelly

My New jellyBot Prototype, Racky

  About a year ago I started building a robotic jellyfish inspired by Festo’s submergible AquaJelly. I was just beginning to figure out how to get the thing moving when I got sidetracked with the prospect of launching a Kickstarter campaign and dropped the project cold. During this whole long year while I’ve been fulfilling the said Kickstarter, this poor jelly prototype (“Boney”) has watched silently from a distant shelf in the workroom, begging me to pick it up again. Finally this weekend I was able to spend some time giving the old parts a makeover… in yellow. I added a nice gentle curve to the moving pieces, taking after the design of its cousins, the delta robots : Last year I decided to use a rack and pinion to get the parts to move in leu of Festo’s fancy linear actuator that they showcase in their model. Never having used, let alone designed a working rack…