BuildIts in Progress

I'm experimenting in moving from Blogger to a static site generator.

This isn't one of my usual project blog posts, but I owe my dear readers some context for the lack of project content.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, robot land has an annual car-and-other-vehicle show.

Robot land has an annual car-and-other-vehicles show.

I installed a DRO on the Clausing.

Not long after my masters thesis went online, clones of the mini cheetah actuators started showing up on AliExpress/Alibaba.

Here's the detailed post to go with the pictures and videos I've been dribbling out over the last few months.

I've been keeping my eye out on craiglist and machinery auctions for a small (but not that small) lathe for a while now, but small lathes (other than import mini-lathes) are pretty uncommon.

Lots of progress on the jumping robot based on this mechanism.

I've made a lot of progress on the software and control side of the espresso machine, and learned some good lessons about designing the real version of the machine.

Over a year ago I started porting my motor control firmware away from mbed.

Even before getting a lever espresso machine, I've been thinking about how I might design one if I were to do it from scratch.

You'll now notice that I added a Feed tab to the top of the page.

I've had a La Pavoni Professional lever espresso machine for a couple years now, which I got on ebay and fixed up.

Getting back to this mechanism.

Until Google axe-murdered it recently, I used Google Play Music to store my music collection and stream it to my various devices.

I did another batch of Furuta pendulums and took a timelapse of the assembly: These were done in a bit of a hurry, and nothing was changed from last time.

This was inevitable, but the pandemic has accelerated my home-shop setup.

I put together a mostly-3D-printed prototype of the variable-pitch screw idea.

I just noticed that as of this month, I've had build-its.blogspot.com for 10 years.

An idea I've had in the back of my head for a while now is using varying transmission ratios to transfer kinetic energy between bodies.

A month or two back I tried out anodizing a titanium bicycle fork.

I've been working on a large robot-size motor drive, with a design target of 75V, >70A (peak phase) continuous with heatsinking, and >150A peak.

I built 6 furuta pendulums for a university controls class: Since the original furuta pendulum was all built out of scrap I had lying around, I had to redesign pretty much everything from scratch.

Here's a photo-dump of some pictures from assembling the herd of Mini Cheetahs. 150 Stators: 150 Front actuator housings with output bearing installed: 50 upper legs.