Robot Dreams has been covering the Robo-One competition in Japan and just posted this video of one of our PhantomX Hexapods in a qualifying round for the 4.5 meter dash. It’s always awesome to see our crawlers traversing the globe, and soon enough there will be a PhantomXÂ Hexapod in every city, in every country. Not that we’re planning a hexapod uprising or anything. Definitely not.
PhantomX Hexapod at Robo-One in Japan!
September 6th, 2012FIXBOT to the Rescue!
September 4th, 2012Everyone needs a purpose. Some teach, some build – and some fix. Check out this video featuring the adorable FIXBOT using Sugru to fix all sorts of things. Sugru is a great little mold-able rubber that can be used to fix and make all sorts of things.
Via Boing Boing
Take a Sneak Peak at the PhantomX Quadruped
August 30th, 2012The PhantomX Quadruped just crawled into the store and we wanted to share a quick sneak peak of what it’s capable of. Check out this video of our Quad strafing around the warehouse like it owns the place. Stay tuned for more videos and information about this awesome robot.
PhantomX Hexapod Running Phoenix Code
August 28th, 2012
Well Zenta and Kurt Eckhardt are at it again, this time porting the Lynxmotion Phoenix code to our very own PhantomX Hexapod! Running the Phoenix code, our Hexapod’s movements are smooth as silk while it scuttles across the floor in an incredible life-like fashion. Just check out these videos to see it in action.
The code for putting the Phoenix code on your Hexapod is available here. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress and may require some hardware modification of your Hexapod, so proceed at your own risk.
Laser Dazer!
August 23rd, 2012
As you may know, our Desktop RoboTurret is incredibly versatile and can perform a huge number of tasks. Latest on that list is : entertaining your pets! Just load up our Laser Dazer code onto the RoboTurret’s Arduino Compatible controller and you can turn your RoboTurret into an autonomous pet toy. The RoboTurret will fire up its built in laser, then pick random points to aim the laser at Your pet will be chasing the laser around in no time flat.
The code is ready to use out of the box, but we’ve also made it very easy to modify the variables that control the Laser Dazer’s behavior. You can change the speed, range and more on the RoboTurret to suit your pet’s personality. The Laser Dazer Code is available in the standard Desktop RoboTurret code download
TRTV Episode 2: Matt Burns Himself
August 22nd, 2012We design a ton of parts for our kits, and we make quite a few of them using our Laser CNC. For some parts however, we contract outside companies to turn our designs into reality. Working with different companies can have pitfalls – including not getting the material that you were promised.
So what’s a team to do when they suspect they’re getting shafted by a manufacturer? Test! In this case we used Boedeker.com’s Burn Test Chart to help us figure out what kind of plastic we had on our hands. Between the burn chart and some known plastics, we were able to figure out the that we were in fact getting the wrong plastic for our grippers.
And as a friendly reminder: be smarter than us and take safety precautions when playing testing with fire: you don’t want to end up like Matt in the video below.
Desktop RoboTurret Face Tracking Project
August 20th, 2012
Christian Penaloza just posted a great demo video with one of our Desktop RoboTurrets running his custom face tracking code. He’s using OpenCV and C++ to do the facetracking, and C# for a user interface. This is a great example of the kind of thing you can do with the RoboTurret.
We’re really excited to see the code for the project, as well as what else Christian has in store for the RoboTurret.
RFID Implants
August 17th, 2012
Friend of Trossen, Amal Graafstra recently attended Toorcamp and set up an unassuming little station. At this station, for $30 and a liability waiver, Amal would implant an RFID tag into your hand! You can read more at The Forbes Article on Amal or Amal’s write-ups on Toorcon
The tags, much like our Glass Ampoule Tags, will allow their bearers to activate RFID enabled devices with a mere wave of the hand. No more loosing their keys for these implantees!
New Robot Gearhead Motors
August 15th, 2012
The Trossen Engineering team goes through a lot of motors, so we have pretty high expectations of any motors we want to put in a robot. Well our new Robot DC Gearhead Motors w/ Encoder meet and blow past those expectations!
These motors are perfect for robots weighing 2-5 lbs, and the RPM allows them to pair perfectly with 3-4″ Wheels. Each of our motors have an integrated encoder to help calculate odometry data so these motors will help get your robotic rover up and running in no time!
Check out the video to see one of our test ‘bots zipping around the warehouse.
Weekend at Trossen – Episode 1
August 14th, 2012Life is busy here at Trossen Robotics. Between filling orders, sourcing/posting new products and customer service calls, we’re constantly working on something. This flurry of activity often leaves us with no time to do our favorite thing – engineer new kits and products. But have no fear, that won’t stop us from designing, building and testing new kits – we just have to wait for the weekend.
In this new series you’ll get a chance to see the process behind the products and get some insight to how we work here at Trossen Robotics. This week we’ll take a look at the soon to be released Motor & Wheel Starter Kit.
