Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Stacking Memory Toppers



As punishment for not attending class on April 14, the teacher made us go to the blog presentation of progress of the third set as video ... there you have punks ...



Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Perfect Attendance Award

Sweet Revenge The Black Diamond

happy to end the day we got rid of the annoying noise that produced the solenoids to strike the keys. To achieve rubber gaskets placed on the tip of each stem. Can see the result in the following video.


Orcobot - Black Diamond (Stratovarius)

Without wishing kill two birds with one stone, the rubber seal greatly reduces the sound produced by playing every note and also prevents the solenoid "fly off" by the rebound of the keys, so we should not stop solenoids with a top wall as we did in the past tests.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Story A Slave For A Day



Today
solved a few problems with the power that came to the solenoids, for example, each solenoid pressure exerted was terribly small when one solenoid is activated at the same time. As you can guess, because this action is very common to play the piano, it becomes a pretty big problem.

To resolve this problem and achieve good control over each of the solenoids that will play the musical notes implemented the following circuit:

Electronic Chart Activation of each solenoid.

The design is a pair of transistors in Darlington configuration . The base of the first transistor, a 2N2222A, is activated by a pin PIC microcontroller output through a resistance of 100 Ohms. Establishing a low impedance path between the emitter and collector which activates a second transistor, a TIP41C. Finally, it creates a low impedance path between the emitter and collector to activate the solenoid, and generate the movement required to activate the desired key.

Thanks to all this, we test the "right hand" of Orcobot and with the keyboard, the result is the following:



Orcobot - Black Dragon (Luca Turilli Cover)

Finally, we ordered a bit of wiring hell that was among the eight solenoids that are tested and the master microcontroller.
metalheads brothers

Saturday, April 4, 2009

African Hair Salon In Brampton

Orkish Piano Lesson Hunting High And Low

Good news this week suddenly build a base to do some performance testing and monitoring of the end of the robot actuators.

Building the base for testing.

With these tests we observed the behavior that will once solenoids attached to the structure of robot, with the advantage of not having to put it together yet. In addition, it allowed us to design changes needed before mounting the final structure.

Today we test the control circuit with a full octave. The process was carried out as follows:
  1. develop the application you care about the tune in MIDI format we want the robot run.
  2. Once decodes the MIDI application, sent to the microcontroller (PIC18F4550 ) messages that interest us ( NOTE ON and NOTE OFF ) serially.
  3. The microcontroller is responsible to activate or deactivate the solenoids according to instructions received from the PC.
Then the video of the test.



As you can see in the video, the speed of the solenoid is being run pretty good, so quiensabe ... Once completed, the orcobot could become the Jens Johansson of robots: D.

Unfortunately we a little behind in building the structure of the robot. Take advantage of these spring break to move as close as possible, we hope to have some pictures soon.

still testing and orcobot is getting closer to seeing the light.
Gods to Valhalla are on our side.