OZY ROBOTICS

The day job was getting routine, and I realized that I had tuition reimbursement as a perk. So I looked at the UMass Lowell course guide and realized there was a graduate course in robotics.

It sounded like fun, so I went off to check it out. There, I met Fred Martin.

Fred is wonderful. While at MIT he created the Handy Board. This was the basis for the Lego Mindstorms. His class was impressive, in that he has managed to take the opaque discipline of embedded systems, and bring it to grade school students. I would have been a more dangerous grade school student had such things existed when I was that age.

Anyways, I needed a class project. I partnered with Roger Matar, a hard working, talented mechanical engineer, and we built a 4 axis CNC milling machine out of “old hairdryer” parts. Actually, everything came from a well stocked junk box, and a few talented scrap piles. Many long weekend hours later, we had something that would carve stuff from a diagram drawn in Solidworks. See the attached video, or visit Fred’s archive of the class web pages.

http://www.cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.548-spr03/student/woswald/

Ellen Driscoll, a wonderful artist, needed assistance with the creation of a animated LED sign for a public art project for the city of Boston.

I assisted, providing technical, and technically spiritual guidance — in the form of engineering design guidence, oversight, manufacturing assistance, part selection and procurement, debugging, Linux support, etc.   Paul Badger spent many hours on the details of the design.   MAKE created a truly impressive enclosure.

The sign is about 6 feet high, and contains over two thousand blue LED’s.    The animation is controlled by an Arm based single board computer running Linux.

http://www.ellendriscoll.net/update/recent_brightanime.htm