We pride ourselves as being ‘explorers’ and this week we began another exciting expedition. We are building a Makerbot CupCake CNC 3D Additive Printer.
Simply put our “robot” is the brainchild of some of the brilliant minds contributing to Make Magazine that have started their own company (MakerBot Industries) producing open-source hardware robots that print three-dimensional objects (of just about anything) using ABS plastic (and a few other variants) or frosting (see ‘the frostruder’). It is a derivative of the RepRap self-replicating robot movement (also open-source hardware) and is gaining quite a bit of popularity among technology enthusiasts who want to experiment designing real-world objects.
Below you will find a photo documentation of our first few hours of progress. We’ll post more as the work continues.
The Unboxing... Lots of parts.
Hey Cool! A tube of skate bearings!
Kim found the belts!
The RepRap Motherboard (under a rainbow...sigh!)
The extruder controller board
The axis (X/Y/Z) motoro controllers
Kim checks, sorts, and detaches the lasercut wood components
This doesn't look anything like the picture of the parts provided in the kit!
The X-Stage subkit.
The Y-Stage subkit.
The Z-Stage subkit.
The body assembly subkit.
The X-Y Stage subkit.
The proud categorizers (Kim, Joe)
I think after we finish this we will need to build a rabid security bot to guard our cute little “cupcake.”
TTFN!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on May 28, 2010
The Museum of London has launched a new Augmented Reality (AR) application for the iPhone platform that, when launched, allows the user to view historic images superimposed over the visible world (via iPhone camera and screen). The following illustrations were posted via Gizmodo as possible views one might see:
This is an exciting illustration of the power of “collective memory” a concept we use to describe the knowledge management-like capabilities presented by spatialized AR data. Depending on the amount of stored detail one could rewind a specific view through multitudes of perspectives of a single area to see information from yesterday or a few centuries ago. This concept is a key component in the architecture of our iARM ecology.
Because our system is vision based, we have an extensive amount historical footage for areas of interest and the daily use of our system continuously adds to our model making for an amazingly powerful captured dimensional recording of our world.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on May 26, 2010
If we caught your attention with our last post but you’re having a difficult time understanding what’s so exciting about a little research and some images narrating a potential future rest assured we have a lot to talk about.
The first thing we need to address is one of the “Hows” of the visualization technology. Even though we have several patents pending, we are still too sensitive to expose the ‘whole tomato’ to the masses, but suffice it to say we have cracked the Augmented Reality visual registration nut. The following is our first delving into the details that are under development.
What is this nut? Let me explain…
If you’ve ever used the current lineup of “AR Apps” available on Android or iPhone platform you’ve seen a neat portal into the world of Augmented Reality. You typically see a camera view of the world around you presented on a hardware screen with digital information presented (most often clumsily) on top of the view. As you move the phone around you see that information move accordingly as if it’s locked to some physical location. Sometimes you see that information move or ‘drift’ for unknown reasons and that is really the problem with current tech AR.
Registration is the accuracy by which the computing platform can “lock” the digital world onto the physical world and up to today, that technology has been susceptible to all sorts of errors and interference. One of the reasons registration is still immature is because developers are relying on hardware improvements to solve their problems. We believe that while hardware, especially heavily funded hardware (thank you Apple), may eventually get accurate enough to solve the registration problem we don’t have the time or patience to wait. We instead spent our time researching and testing an elegant and simple solution that would work with today’s hardware capabilities.
If you look at the narrative slides below you can see our User Experience Model relies heavily on pixel-accurate digital registration. We can “paint” anything including highlighting objects, manually marking the environment and even embedded three-dimensional models. I can assure you these aren’t the crazy vision of a designer with no insight as to how the technology works but are based on our registration system (U.S. Patent Pending).
Our system is primarily vision-based, but leverages gross measurements (with error detection) of GPS, Cell/WIFI triangulation, and digital compass hardware. That means that it uses cameras, models, and some other fancy wizardry to rapidly identify the observed view and paint objects within that domain accordingly.
That’s all for now but we’ll be presenting some more details on the system at ARE2010 and are excited to continue this discussion.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on May 24, 2010
About a year ago, Tanagram was granted its first direct (meaning we weren’t a sub-contractor) DARPA research funded program. Our goal was to improve situational awareness for soldiers deployed in contested (dangerous) cultures. During this program we proposed creating a complete server / client based architecture that responded to the program needs by providing digital augmentation of the surrounding environment. Tons of research, some prototype concepts, and a few patents later we are now cleared to share it with you.
We’ll talk more about the technology stack and client platform(s) in future posts, but for now you may read our final report.
Find it here.
Take special note of the appendix with the storyboard illustrating the concepts defined. It is much easier to consume than the other thirty-ish pages.
Oh… did I mention we are building it now? Yup… It’ll be a few years before it’s available at Walmart, but we’re on it.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on May 21, 2010
Menlo Park is a mystical place. A place of unicorns and giants. Behind Tim (pictured above) is a tree it would take 4 people to wrap their arms around and it is sitting in someone’s front yard. Tim and I were consistently amazed by the sights, sounds, smells (Jasmine everywhere) that permeate this land of imagination. It’s no wonder so many amazing things are born here.
Posted by tanagramster on May 5, 2010
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