As I’ve been exploring very basic mechanical engineering with natural and/or wood components (and no motors), I’ve noticed that AI image generator systems REALLY don’t understand these kinds of physical systems. *Sometimes* they can interpret images well (sometimes not), but in pretty much 100% of the cases if you say something like draw me a schematic build diagram for ____ with ____ features
, especially Dalle will just invent some impossible nonsense that is not only unbuildable, but if it were buildable would not function. When AI systems reach a place where they can more accurately understand and compose real world objects, well, it’s going to be “nuts.”
Until then, we’ll have to make do with some approximatic facsimiles. This image series is a loose interpretation mostly from Ideogram of what was intended to be a SCARA robot drawing arm. Normally, the motion of this type of arm runs parallel to the ground in XY axes, so forward/back & left/right, and they are rigid in the Z axis, up/down. Ideogram either doesn’t understand that or simply doesn’t want to do that because all the wooden SCARA robot arms I tried to get it to make are not actually correct. But some of them are still pretty cool and give idea fodder, if not accurately representing mechanical engineering principles. More at the link here, and highlights below.

How those joints are supposed to move, I have no idea, but not a bad try aesthetically.

The one I’m about to build will use syringes and tubing for manual operator-controlled hydraulic movement in order to replace motors and other electronic control elements. It won’t be big like these but at least these give some fun ideas about what scaling up could be like.

Anyway, will post pics of the IRL one later on once we get it working!
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