Robotics by TK

Improvement in quality I decided to try 3D printing with PETG since PLA has limitations when it comes to heat resistance and strength. People in 3D printing forums suggested PETG and ABS, but they warned me that PETG is difficult to print. I had scoured the internet trying to find out what perfect 3D printing profiles would result in good quality prints. Almost all of them emphasised that a hot-bed was needed. Now I have two 3D printers, one with a hot bed and one without. My 3D printer with a hot bed has a Bowden Tube, and some people warned that PETG does get stuck in Bowden Tubes sometimes, which scared me a little bit. So, for my first PETG filament test print, I used a 3D printer with a direct drive extruder but no hot bed. I was initially scared that it wouldn't stick. But my first test print went well. The print was a 3 mm cube, and the resulting brim stuck well. Next, I decided to print a more complex image to see how it would fare. I had set the recommended PETG profiles;...

There comes a time in every Maker’s journey where they feel a strong urge to create a PoV Display (Persistence of Vision Display). I am, of course, generalizing here. But odds are that if you are a Maker or an electronics enthusiast, you may have come across a PoV Display project. Perhaps on Youtube, on hobbyist forums, blogs or Facebook Makers’ groups. Part of the reason why these projects are so popular is because of how simple and cheap they are to make. You need very few materials, programming is (somewhat) straightforward and you have flexibility in your choice of sensors. To sum it up, it is very easy to make a PoV Display, yet so easy to get it wrong. Unfortunately, my experience was in the latter. I’ll go into that later in the post. So let’s briefly go through what PoV (Persistence of Vision) actually means: Persistence of Vision refers to how your eyes (more like your brain) perceives objects that move faster than 1/12th of a second. If they move fast enough, the image “pe...

Did you know that you can control your DSLR camera via command line instructions. Not me! And I wouldn’t have until I attempted this project. But that’s besides the point, this project goes beyond me simply using a DSLR camera to obtain a video feed. I used a 2-DOF pan-tilt rig powered by Arduino and the OpenCV library to track the movement of a person’s face. In a way, one could call this a rudimentary example of an animatronic head. If you move upwards, the head will tilt upwards to look at you. Almost like its gaze will follow in whichever direction you move. (Provided you remain within the frame, of course!) I tried placing several cute toys on the pan-tilt rig such as a duck or a sheep, and a ladybird. Setting up a DSLR camera for your video feed: I used a DSLR camera so that I can position the camera wherever I wanted to. In addition, you get a higher frame rate, better image quality etc… This project works with a laptop camera as well, which is what I was using at the be...