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Lego and a Nerd.

  • 13-06-2010 3:16pm
    #1
    Posts: 17,378 ✭✭✭✭


    This is massively impressive.. No idea how people can do this.


    "Lego felt tip 110" printer connected to an Apple Mac. This is not mindstorms, I designed/built/coded it all from scratch including analog motor electronics, sensors and printer driver, the USB interface uses a "wiring" board.

    FAQ: Track name? "Christopher and Raphael just popper Shinichi Osawa distortion disco edit"

    FAQ: How long did this take? Hard to say, maybe 3 weeks working evenings.

    FAQ: You're a student and this is a university project? I'm not a student, this is just a hobby project.

    FAQ: Just a remake of the 1092a? No, I'd never seen the 1092a until now. However some of the parts came from a 8094 kit amongst others many years ago. It is made to my own design, but I acknolwedge influences and the great work of the official lego designers !

    FAQ: Does this use mindstorms? Nope, wiring demo board + homemade analog electronics and sensors.

    FAQ: DPI? Dots per inch? Approx 75 DPI

    FAQ: PPM? Pages per minute? Not even 1! I sped things up a little in the video editing to keep it interesting to watch :)

    FAQ: Helvetica? Yes of course, my respect to those who noticed :)

    FAQ: Full color version/more colours? Originally I was going to do 3 colour version, but I had to simplify as only have 4 lego motors.

    FAQ: Open source, schematics etc? Yes, I'll try to get around to this soon. Unfortunately I'm pretty busy at work at moment and documenting this project to a good standard will take a while. Sorry :(

    FAQ: Wrote your own driver? Yes, uses standard Mac OS print mechanism.

    FAQ: Are you using some sort of MCU demo board(the black pcb)? Yes. [1] http://wiring.org.co/hardware/

    FAQ: re: Mac vs PC abuse? Video not meant as a Mac advert and I'm sorry if the Apple logo offends anyone. I just find them easier to use.

    FAQ: Felt tip damage drying up? Yes this is a problem, but one felt tip usually lasts for quite a few pages.

    FAQ: Felt tip auto-capping? Nope, sorry.

    FAQ: Sensor info: Horizontal positioning using homemade shaft encoder (black/white rotating lego squares you see in the vid) with a SY-CR102 photo reflector from Maplins, (only £0.89 or $1.30). This is into a sampled analog input as I couldn't get full enough saturation to trigger the ext interrupt pins. There are also push buttons built into lego bricks for left and right end stop detection.


Comments

  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,879 ✭✭✭Coriolanus


    Yeah, saw it before. Still amazing though. :)


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 12,556 ✭✭✭✭AckwelFoley


    lol. smart guy.

    Nearly as good as Macgyver


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,498 ✭✭✭BrokenArrows


    thats pretty cool.

    one of our projects in college was to create a lego robot and program it.
    Lego developed a java based API for doing this stuff.

    I made a robot which was supposed to drive around and collect different coloured lego blocks and sort them. it failed miserably. haha.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,838 ✭✭✭Nulty


    Its people like that that make everyone else wonder what point there is in competing!?!


  • Registered Users Posts: 50 ✭✭E0inz


    That pretty sweet...I want one


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