Monday, April 21, 2014

​I had hopes that it would not be a challenging work, but it was not as easy as I thought. First things first, I didn't invent this pan/tilt mechanism, the one comes with Pixy is a similar solution. So if there is credit it goes to the project team. I got the inspiration (!) from them.

The old friend HDPE comes to the stage again. Why do I use this stuff for everything, because;

I have it,
It's durable, a little flexible but not brittle,
It's machineable, drillable, sandable and can be filed like soft metals, and can be cut with any small teeth saw.
and it looks good. ​​Below are the stages for creating the pan/tilt mechanism. Pan servo is fastened with screws, but tilt servo is kept only with the bracket (painted in black, later) and there is a small trick to keep it in place. I made a small groove on the plate and filed one side of the mount of servo to fit in that groove, so that it doesn't move back and forth.









And, the final product put together,




Sunday, April 6, 2014

After months of waiting, I received my Pixi. I mentioned before, it was one of the Kickstarter projects that I backed. The guys from Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon are behind it. It's a vision sensor that can quickly be taught new objects, and it can be connected directly to Arduino. Which suits me nicely because for this project I'm using another Arduino compatible board DigiX. It's also from Kickstarter but another story.

Here are the first pictures of the product, mounting brackets fastened.




It processes images at a frame rate of 50 Hz and support multiple interfaces: UART serial, SPI, I2C, digital out, or analog out. I must say that from my point of view, the result of the project was the best one so far coming from Kickstarter. There was also an optional purposefully built pan/tilt kit but I thought that I could make it by myself by using servos out of the house-stock.