MathBot
This is MathBot. Three other ME students and I created it for our Robotics course at Georgia Tech, ME 4451, in the Fall of 2011.
MathBot uses a TRENDnet ProView Camera (which was graciously provided by the Robotics Lab) to recognize numbers and an operator placed below it using Matlab. After solving the simple arithmetic, Matlab sends the answer to an Arduino program, which controls the two steppers motors and one servo motor to write the correct answer on the whiteboard.
The XY stage of MathBot was borrowed directly from my MakerBot Cupcake, saving me a lot of CAD time and seriously decreasing our material costs. Thanks to the fact that all of MakerBot’s design files are available on Thingiverse, it was extremely easy to implement the stage into the design. The downside to this was the extremely noticeable lack of 3d printing I was able to accomplish in my room during the second half of the semester.
The pen arm design was inspired by a 3d-printed hexapod leg I was able to borrow from one of my group members, Harrison Jones. Like all of the other wooden parts on the bot, it was laser-cut at the Georgia Tech Invention Studio. Both the camera and pen arm were fastened to 80/20 bars, which were milled to length, tapped, and bolted to the baseplate.
If you’d like to see the website we created for the bot, as well as the final report and code we wrote, click here. If you’d like to see the robots that our peers created for the class, head over to the class website (scroll down to the “Some Previous Projects” section). All design files are open source, and available upon request.