Hi! Welcome to my website. I occasionally post updates to cool projects I am working on here.
Need some super caps? This is a spot welder we made to weld the battery connections on our tank. Made out of two 3000 Farad caps and assorted junk we found lying around.
The robotic tank lives on! Redesigned the motor mount with an easy adjustable jacking bolt to get the correct track tension. Dual 2 kilowatt motors need very tight belts!
Adapter board for a CH330 USB to UART IC. This thing is pretty small, at about 1 square inch. It's an ultra bare bones serial adapter that can be made for about 75 cents. Right angle female header pins stick out from the center on the bottom for UART and and a USB Micro B port is soldered to the top.
The copper looking pipe is a new type of part cooling. To reduce the physical size of the gantry, the motor is attached to the frame, with a teflon hose leading to the outlet. The blower motor will most likely be a bldc motor with a 3d printed compressor housing, as high pressure will be needed to produce reasonable air flow. The exact size and shape of the outlet will need to be tested and iterated on.
Close up of the printer gantry. It will be a CoreXY based printer, with a remote direct drive extruder, remote part cooling, and a carbon gantry. All these design decisions lead to an end effector thats small and lighweight, increasing potential print speed and reducing the footprint of the printer relative to the build volume.
New 3D printer build. I got quoted over $300 for a single PLA print and decided it's time that I get large scale, reliable 3D printing capability. The print size will be rougly 350 mm^3, enough to print the entire electric bike pulley mold in one go.
Whats cheaper and more dangerous than a Lime scooter? Lemon scooter!
SoldAR. We hacked a TS100 Soldering iron and used the MagicLeap AR headset to create an assisted soldering tool for RevolutionUC.
This is Bit Bandit. It uses OpenCV trained on an image set to activley look for empty power outlets, plugs in, and starts mining bitcoin with the GPU strapped to its back. Entry for MakeHarvard.
This is a robot we built for hackCWRU. It uses a stepper motor direct drive and time-of-flight sensors to simulate LIDAR and map the world around it as a 2D point cloud. It's not true LIDAR because the sensor only sweeps at about a 160 degree angle and not all the way around.
Drivetrain and suspension for a new autonomous robot build. Using an oDrive, brushless RC motor, and external encoder to make a cheap DIY brushless servo drive.
Speedometer mockup for ebike. Next thing to work on once the drivetrain works.
New Prototype driver board for the LED Nixie Clock project, this time with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The microcontroller is an Adafruit Feather 32u4, allowing me to control the entire clock from my phone.
Rendering CAD models directly on the Nifty Parts website using WebAssembly and OpenGL ES. OBJ files had to be utilized because they store model color, and everyone wants color these days.
Carving a mold for a pulley on the Inventables X-Carve. Unfortunetly, this machine is not stiff enough for anything more demanding than small sign carvings. Will have to 3D print it instead
Large CNC router being built for the Innovation Studio at OSU.
Main drive pulley for the electric bike. It's an odd shape because it snakes around the rear brake caliper and bolts to the disc brake .mounting pattern. It will be layed up in carbon in a 3D printed mold.
Wire vise mockup designed to help solder wire connections of various sizes. Stand off and PCB contruction, meaning that I can get kits made at a PCB mill for real cheap.
Battery pack for the electric bike project. Made up of 39 LG HG2 18650 Li-ion cells, its rated at 48V, 9Ah, 90 amps continuous discharge, in 13S 3P configuration. Definately going to use Li-ion for more projects.
CakeBot can only ice cookies. Won at Hakron 3000.
Motor mount and tensioner, printed in ABS. Jacking bolts against the frame are used to set the belt tension.
Captive nuts inside belt tensioner for electric bike project. Perfect retention with 0.25 mm interference fit in ABS.
Other side of the Electric Bike motor mount.
Compact 3D printer design. Your average 3D printer only uses around 15% of it's volume to make parts. This is upwards of 40%, however there is always room for improvement.
Electric Bike drivetrain layout, in Solidworks.
A Nifty Parts sticker.
18650 battery pack for the tank. Made up of about 100 used Samsung cells.
Top of Tank bot with the access covers removed.
We are re-using industrial brushless servo motors, which generally have a lot less torque than your average RC BLDC motor. With these gearboxes, the tank's max speed is just above walking speed, perfect for a following robot.
Plate aluminum for the side uprights, combined with spacers under compression gave the tank the majority of it's stiffness, even without the top or bottom panels on.
We thought it would be cool to build a tank. So here we are.
Made some custom protoboard, because everything else sucked. We now sell this on Nifty Parts. I used DirtyPCBs again, which gave me very nice boards. I'll have to try out JLCPCB for quicker turnaround. Was going to sell it under "GLK Robotics" but thats just a big meme now.
1981 Volkswagon Rabbit. Basically needs to be stripped down to the bare shell. Rust around the subframe mounts. Best way to go about this is to literally build a "rotisserie" dolly to easily access all sides of the car, espeially the underside.
Lixie Clock first light.
Lixie digit, it's alive!
Lixie PCB populated with SK6812 addresable RGBW LEDs.
Clock Digit PCB through my jerry-rigged "microscope".
PCBs for the Lixie clock project, very nice quality from Dirty PCBs.
Plane bot! It shoots small balsa planes, gravity-fed-machine-gun style. Built at Think[box] for HackCWRU 2018.