Jelly

Jelly

jellyBot : Rolley (the second prototype)

Ok, so the proof of concept I worked on back in October looked awesome, but it couldn’t really move on its own… and there were a couple of reasons why: I had mounted standard servos on the drive shaft instead of the continuous rotation type. I found out you need more than a breadth of 180 degrees to make a rack and pinion move far enough to do anything useful! Also, my drive shaft needed some roller bearings to tension the rack down onto the pinion in order to stop all the slippage. Since both of these things involve the mount of the motors specifically, I took the time to completely redesign that whole part to be more solid in general… after all, it is the very core of the robot- therefore the most important part! Tighter tolerances = happy jelly. So what I ended up making was a set of brackets that both…

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…

Jelly

Robo Jelly : Progress

Even since I first saw the Festo Aquajelly I’ve wanted to make one of my own. With the arrival of our brand new Flash Forge 3D printer…. this week seemed like the right time to start prototyping. If you haven’t ever seen the Festo Jelly, I advise you to check out the video below. This company inspires me. They sell fancy pneumatic parts and actuators but for shits and grins they make amazing robots that mimic the organic movement of animals. I mean, in a fantasy I’d come stay at their headquarters and make things with their parts for days on end…but who that I know of wouldn’t? I sat down earlier this week and drew up some parts in Sketchup. With a couple of revisions I made this jelly skeleton. It took about an hour to print one set of arms (I needed six total). So at around midnight…