corvi (corivax) wrote,

That damn robot, by request, believe it or not

I've spent a lot of my time in Boston telling a brand-new and unsuspecting audience about That Damn Robot. A couple people have requested a picture of it.

This is the GYRE without the safety padding.

It's a cube fourteen inches on a side. There's a thruster cone in the center of each edge. Any component we could machine of aluminum, we did - NASA requres untethered zero-gravity devices to be fifty pounds or less, and aluminum is light. I have no idea why they're not metric about this. We're at 47.3 pounds, after some dirty tricks like removing the metal solenoid casings.

The silver box on top with all the color-coded ports contains the three expensive motherboards that do vision/feedback calculations. We've only utterly destroyed one of them accidently! :)

You can see the emergency stop at one of the top back corners; every mad scientist device needs a Big Red Button. It's in the bylaws.

The ends of the tanks are visible on the side facing toward the viewer - they're covered with padding covered with brown gaffer tape.

You can see one of the three cameras in the center of the other side; it's just a webcam in a custom white Delren casing. Delren is, uh, a unique machining experience, full of holiday spirit. Fills the shop with fake snow. Fake snow that static-clings to random objects. Like, oh, walls, ceilings, jeans, moving parts on expensive CNC mills, small children, and passing neutrinos. I still occaisionally find Delren shavings in my clothing, and it's been about two years. Worse than the roommate who broke a bottle of glitter in the closet.
Tags: public, that damn robot

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