I made today a small experimental upgrade to the “Grabbit-1” prototype all-wood robot grabber hand thing. For lack of a better name, I’m calling it the grabbit-flapper-1
. More images and a video at the Imgur gallery here. (You can also see the ohara controllers in the background, from a separate unrelated build.)

Well, okay, there are two upgrades here, one is putting those plastic eyes onto the grabbit
claw. The second is putting a flapping wing mechanism, cable-controlled, connected to a little hook at the bottom which is used to actuate the wings. The video linked above shows the best overview of how the mechanism is constructed.
I went through a lot of YouTube vids at high speed to figure out how to get the motion that I wanted, and I finally found it in this video of a scale model of Da Vinci’s ornithopter. (Or zoom in for a close up here.)
I haven’t been able to find a good reference from Leonardo’s actual drawings to verify this as a match, but the mechanism works – even if mine is extremely quick and janky, like all the rest of these experiments while I learn how the mechanisms work, and how to piece them together without too much expense or hassle.
I had intended for mine to actually send the wire to the back with the handle of the mouth wire too, but it wasn’t working with the tubing that I had, and preferred to get something simpler that works in all cases instead. And the action of this one as it is with the wings feels good in the hands.
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