My Arduino is in da houze!
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform…and it is awesome. I went for the Arduino Duemilanove, packaged nicely with some LEDs, resisters, leads, and solderless breadboard. Did I mention this bad-boy employs USB connectivity? Prototyping, FTW!
Next step: get this sucker talking to Ubuntu on my Mini 9.
Step after that: turn on some LEDs
Step even after that: MF-ing robot
+1 Nerd, indeed.
Let me clear the air before this one. There are four things to know about me. In no particular order…
1) I love humanoid robots.
2) I love androids.
3) I love drawing humanoid robots…and
4) I love Android OS.
Now that that is out of the way, let me say that this post doesn’t pertain to any of those four, for better or for worse. This post serves to shed some light on some custom robotic applications. As always though,
FTW.
While I am holding it down on Arduino and Lego Mindstorm front, there are, quite thankfully, people utilizing robotics to improve procedures in real situations. Nothing is better than robots, lasers, and gadgetry…unless it falls into another field dear to my heart. Quality assurance. I should trade in my twin monitors in for one of these bad boys:
Now that looks like some precision automation exemplified.
So the gist of my rant is that there are automated assembly applications all over the place. You name it, it can be automated…and with some crazy levels of precision… two tenths of a micron precision.
Take a look at a exemplary robotic setup.
I could color that sucker green, in an effort to appease my fan-base. Or, alternatively, I could throw up a pic of something slicker than green robots….
Could those be lasers? Yep…I’m talking about some 6-axis automated inspection system lasers…for the win. I’ll be the first to admit that high performance machine vision, 6-axis robotics, and bad ass software trumps my form of QA…even though our banking software is pretty sweet.
Regardless of the preferences, hit the bump to read about some real robotics applications. They are numerous…from automotive, clean room, fuel cell, medical devise, solar, and semiconductor implementations, to my already-mentioned QA…there is a ton to check out.
In the mean time, I’ll be horsing around with my robot drawings and laser pointers…pining for an Arduino.
