Chia Ching Yen
Spider
An Open-source Belt-driven Robot
Professional Research Project, 2015-2016
Type / installation, prototyping, robotics
Advisor / Cheng-Luen Hsueh, Kane Yanagawa
Affiliated Organizations / E-ink Holdings, Dept. of EE NCKU
Team / Chia-Ching Yen, Humphrey Yang
E-paper must be sealed in tiles for impermeability. So a movable robots that transmit signal and power were introduced to control tiles in a wide span.
Adaptive shape of working plane
Relocating steppers to define any shape of working plane.
Wireless Signal and Power Transmission
Math of Movement
Optimizing Tool Path
User-interface and Real-time Interaction
To make the robot more compatible with various kind of input, I developed the firmware which accept G-code via serial port. The UI is built by Processing and it also serves as a bridge to Grasshopper for GH’s powerful geometry tools.
Though there is a plug-in named Fireflies which can connect an Arduino board with Grasshopper via serial, it’s not stable on my environment. So I use G-howl to transmit message out of GH to Processing via UDP, then Processing with send them to an Arduino board.
Demo Installation
The demo contains e-ink tiles and the belt-driven robot. The e-ink tiles is sealed in a custom double glass cup to separate vapor. At the bottom of each cups are to coil with different inducing frequency which will result in different direction of circuit under different frequencies of input power.
