Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Virtualized hardware with Modular Things”.
Uh, who are you and what did you bring to the solid works? 3D experience? Hi, I’m Quentin B, I’m a postu researcher at the MIT Center for bits and atams, and here we’re showcasing a modular machine system that lets you prototype machines really quickly. So so what do you mean by it? Lets you prototype machines very quickly. Tell me a little bit about it, so the I mean I can explain what what this machine is for, like what the background is about this machine. I think it’s going to illustrate it. Um, the might Museum asked to build a drawing machine for any event that they had, and we only had two weeks to you know build it. So we use the system that we’re working on at my lab to you know, put it together really quickly, and so what you get with this system is uh set of stepper Motors that you know they. Each of them comes with its own electronics and together they form a network. So it’s trivial to add a new one, because you know it’s just one more node in the network and then the whole system is controlled by a computer that tells the motors to move at that speed to that position. So there’s no single monolithic motherboard that you need to, like you know, write code for it’s all the computer. Oh that’s, interesting! Okay, okay! So it’s a modular system! I’M I’m trying to understand it. It’S a modular system where each Electronic Component, like the servos, has a controller actually attached to itut, so if they all communicate with each other and they and and it’s not like a typical machine, how do you tell it what to do? Okay, that’s a great question! So um, our vision is that you know prototyping machines shouldn’t be painful, so you shouldn’t have to write lowlevel firmware for the motherboard of a machine you instead of that um, you can write code in a high level, programming language in this case we use Python, but It could be, you know, JavaScript could be anything you want, and this application, just you know, communicates with the the network and tells each motor to to move to a given position at a given speed.
That’S all it is, and so in this case we made a drawing machine that you know makes little drawings in two Dimensions, so the application it was really convenient to be able to do it from a python script, because you know I have the camera. I take the picture I process it, I get a bunch of lines and then immediately I can move the motors you know and on those coordinates simple as that perfect wonderful, so um the components in the kit you have. The electronic aspect are the are the mechanical pieces that I see here, part of the kit as well. It is part of a kit yeah, so um everything is open source and the idea is um. If you want to put a machine together, you can 3D print the paths to build one axis, and so this machine is just three AIS stacked on T each. You get a a 2d motion platform, so here at this event, you have the machine that takes your picture and it draws you your face. What other kinds of machines can you build with this kit? It’S not just to build this machine right. It’S a it’s! A toolkit to build whatever what other things have you seen? People try um. The system is super young yeah, but you know the sky is the limit um. You could put any sort of end Factor at my lab.
Specifically, we’ve used this system to um prototype cutting machines, so you have a blade: yeah. Okay, like cutting plotter yeah, exactly my colleague, Jake um is busy with multi-tool machines. So you know instead of a single and Defector you get um a tool. Changer and machine can pick up different tools, so one cool example was an origamy machine that was picking up a pen to draw the full lines you know for the origami and then it doesn’t pick up the knife to to cut the outline of the origami.
Okay. Technically, that’s a kirami! I see okay, interesting, kirami, okay, um, all right, so somebody’s watching this they’ve they’re learning that you have this system out there that’s open source. Where can they learn more about this yeah? So I think the most interesting part of the system is the controllers for the steppers and you can find that by Googling modular things, um um you’ll see a GitHub page. Okay, with you know, all the circuits um and how to an explainer on how to get started.
Okay, so you’ve got a GitHub page for all the explainer on how to do the modular, Electronics, fantastic I’ll, try to get that in a link down in the description of the video. Thank you so much for talking to me and telling me about this. It’S an awesome project and we’ll see you later. Thank you so much .