I am in the process of making a Lego Laser Scanner. The instrument is designed to move a mirror both back and forth and up and down to reflect a laser beam in any direction within a solid angle defined by the range of motion of the mirror. At this stage, the Lego Laser Scanner is more like a Lego Laser Show as it has two motors that rotate at distinct and programmable rates to produce Lissajous figures with the reflected laser beam. Stay tuned, as next week, I plan to have photos and a movie.
To make a useful scanner, I would prefer to use one motor rather than two. This will require some complex gearing, but it is straight-forward. The part that had me a bit puzzled was the fact that I want the scanner to make one horizontal sweep while maintaining a constant vertical position. Once the horizontal sweep is finished, I need it to nudge the vertical orientation of the mirror just a bit, and then perform another horizontal sweep and so on. How to do this with a single motor was not clear. Until I came across a set of fabulous mechanisms by Leo Dorst of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory Amsterdam at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands.
Leo Dorst created a Lego version of the Geneva Mechanism, which moves film through a projector by holding it still while intermittently feeding it through the mechanism. His sketch is above, but better images and instructions exist on his website. He has a wide variety of Lego Mechanisms, that I am sure I will find useful in the near future.
In the meantime, his design (below) of a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm is fantastic!!!
I have found the books below to be very good.
Enjoy,
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
Posted under Fun, Intelligent Systems, Inventions, Lego, NXT, Research, Robotics, Solutions
This post was written by drknuth on April 1, 2007
Can you shape the device’s shell in the likeness of MJ’s head – I think you could make some bucks.