This one is new to me, despite being a kid in the 1980s, the Armatron, a robotic arm from Radio Shack. Here are some videos I’ve had open in tabs for weeks now, so offloading here for safe-keeping:
Apparently despite having some minimal electronic parts, the device is mostly mechanical.
There was also a mobile version:
This video shows the guts of how the mechanism and gearbox work:
All in all, seems like a really cool toy! I wish I had one in good working order to experiment with as a drawing tool.
Was doing some reading on claw machines and their mechanisms, and discovered that probably the first historical example of this machine was called the Erie Digger and was all mechanical, no electricity required. Here is I think one of that original design in action:
I believe this shows the same type of machine but also the mechanism and the controller being operated:
And this looks like a closeup of the mechanism:
Not sure how easy all of that would be to pull off in wood at the scale I can do it, but some useful references here no doubt for down the road when I get to that.
Shorter term, I will definitely try to do a variation of Yowawerts on Youtube’s cardboard claw hand:
And possibly their all cardboard complete claw machine:
From the video description:
You don’t need to use any complex materials such as syringes, motors, wires, programs, or other hard-to-find objects because for this homemade machine, you will only need cardboard, strings / yarn, skewers / BBQ sticks, cutting tools like scissors & cutter, sticking materials like glue and glue gun…
Not in English, but a really great and very clear demo video of different kinds of cams and resulting motions in wood crank automata:
What I’ve found is that while you can watch and sort of understand these things with your eyes, until you’ve actually tried to build them in reality, you don’t really get it.
Found this kinetic sculpture the other day by Christian Werdin that I thought was really cool, called Three Scribes:
Embedded in this Boingboing post about it is another video which shows for a few seconds at the end the mechanisms under the table, which I’d like to find in more detail, personally.
Here’s a longer piece about Werdin, but it’s only in German unfortunately (for me). You can at least see some of his work and workshop if, like me, you don’t speak the language.
As I continue on this train of trying to figure out how to build a low tech human powered version of the Elephant Robotics exoskeleton, I made an important discovery about historical robot types. My working definition of “robot” is of course somewhat broad, and some might argue that what I found is not really itself robotic… but I don’t care about that.
The more polite modern name for my discovery is a remote manipulator, and the older less politically correct name for it is a master-slave manipulator. They are also called waldos after a Heinlein short story. From the Wikipedia, as to origins around hazardous material handling:
In 1945, the company Central Research Laboratories was given the contract to develop a remote manipulator for the Argonne National Laboratory. The intent was to replace devices which manipulated highly radioactive materials from above a sealed chamber or hot cell, with a mechanism which operated through the side wall of the chamber, allowing a researcher to stand normally while working.
The result was the Master-Slave Manipulator Mk. 8, or MSM-8, which became the iconic remote manipulator seen in newsreels and movies, such as The Andromeda Strain or THX 1138.
For reference, here is the THX 1138 scene, though I barely remember that movie:
Note that a remote manipulator is distinct from a glovebox, like we see Homer Simpson using. In a glovebox, you stick your arms in, and they are shielded, but you’re using your own actual hands to manipulate objects. In remote manipulators – waldos – you are not. The action is at a distance, which is part of what makes this an intriguing thing to try to DIY.
I found a number of other videos on this topic of remote or telemanipulator systems, as they are also called. Or “Slave Hands” as they are called in the 1960 video:
Curiously, many of the promo materials for this technology often include the robotic hands lighting a cigarette for a woman, or serving her tea. In the one above, she’s even made to drink from the tea cup, which is a level of trust I would probably not have here were I them. The whole trend of that kind of imagery seems like a weird scientist sublimated puppetmaster/beauty & the beast erotic fantasy undercurrent somehow that I haven’t quite delved into, but definitely appears to be a “thing.” (It’s also on display here in another form in the 1948 GE Master-Slave Manipulator on Cybernetic Zoo – which has tons of related material, by the way).
A similar video from 1956:
1972, different form factor, but same basic idea:
Here’s a more modern demo of this type of technology from 6 years ago:
This heavy duty remote manipulator for large heavy objects is also amazing:
Okay, so the above is all well and good for industrial scale work, but I was hard pressed to find too many DIY examples of remote manipulators, with something that I might try to clone for home use. The below video demonstrates the closest analogue I’ve found to what I might try and build for the purposes of painting with it.
For my purposes, the iteration he has around this form seems most relevant, labelled as Mark 2, starting around 0:32 in the video, here’s a still:
Just eyeballing it, that doesn’t look all that complicated… just some bar linkages to transmit forward/back motion. Unclear how the rest works exactly for the side to side motion – he kinda swings/rotates the arm? I can’t tell from the screen capture exactly how the grabber works, but now that I understand cable controls (kinda), that shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out. Anyway, a number of questions left here, but that’s the best simple DIY-style example I could find, and that gives me plenty of fuel for my own prototypes in this direction.
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.
Accidentally discovered something very interesting while messing around with the Photoshop remove tool, which on certain settings uses generative AI to replace out whatever you select with it.
In this case, was just playing around removing stuff from a photo of our living room, and saw that the tool was inventing paintings or posters that don’t exist:
That one in the corner, I zoomed in on and went through a few AI upscalers with and got this altogether vague still “detail” shot of:
It’s not on its own the greatest image ever seen, but there’s something spooky about how it looks and its ultimate provenance as an AI re-inventing my physical surroundings… almost has a ‘paranormal’ quality to me somehow. I had the idea of like, could I take these AI-imagined figments, and then do like I did with my Matisse copy and make human-done reproductions? Either as faithfully as possible to the original, or else with some enhancements by the human artist?
Here are some other examples. This photo was from about halfway through last year, and represented all the paintings I’d done lately (minus two in another room).
The funny part is, this original real photograph had a couple gaps where there was empty wall space. So I went in to those two areas (marked with arrows in image above) and used the Remove tool in Photoshop on them, and it invented these two other paintings that it thinks look natural there.
Eerily, the one on the left actually shares a lot of characteristics with a paintings which I did end up doing later on, this one, the Head of Hygiea:
Photoshop got the color scheme more or less exactly right, a good bit of the overall “vibe” but it just wasn’t able to see into the subject matter. But otherwise, I’d almost call that “prescient.”
Here’s one last one for the road, two paintings in storage in my small basement studio from over a decade ago (depicted at bottom half of image below). And alongside you can see the progressively extended painting that the Photoshop Remove tool created over a few rounds of trying.
The forms and mark-making on these AI-interpolations don’t quite ring true with my actual painted works, and they aren’t quite snazzy enough yet for me to simply want to replicate them manually. But these are just early accidents and experiments. There is much hyperspatial painting to be explored and uncovered here still.
I appreciated these comments from Dave Winer about/against Bluesky’s having needlessly reinvented many wheels when it comes to web technologies in its pursuit of whatever. I’m not a Bluesky user, but this is absolutely an epidemic disease I’ve seen working as a product manager these past few years in crypto/blockchain…
BTW, in defense of Matt Mullenweg and the culture of the developer community he built over the last 20 years, for better or worse, they don’t do what Bluesky did. They look for prior art and implement it and they don’t deprecate. They’re still running the APIs we invented for blogging before WordPress even existed. The philosophy is “Let’s not argue about decisions made a long time ago, because we want interop.” People have all kinds of harsh things to say about their leadership, but unless you’re a developer you don’t understand that the reason it works is that they have a different code for their code, the only way we get interop is by not re-inventing. There are two competing ways to do things in tech. The blogging world has been taken over by the re-inventors, like the Bluesky people. They make a nice product, but honestly they don’t reallllly want us to work with them, or we wouldn’t be having this friction.
On the crypto side, for all the talk of decentralization, what I’ve seen is that the vasy majority of those projects just end up leaning on AWS in the end. That, of course, and a lot of needlessly complex architecture for rewards that are not always things people need or want. But no, I’m not cynical…
My mind has been coming back again and again to this idea of making a fully manually-operated version of the Elephant Robotics exoskeleton for use as a drawing tool. I got one step closer to actualizing that a few days ago when I finished this very “minimum viable product” version of one type of gripper/grabber mechanism I am calling the grabbit-1.
I have a couple videos of it in operation at the Imgur link here. Here’s a static image:
I was dimly aware that cable controls were a thing you can do for mechanical puppetry, by way of this very retro video series on that topic:
But, like many four dimensional movements, this operation I found extremely difficult to understand without actually building a prototype. (Also see this other more contemporary example of someone using clear tubing and wire for a cable controlled puppet.)
Now, obviously I’m a long way off from the Elephant Robotics exoskeleton model here, but you have to start somewhere when you’re carving up complex physical problems like this. So understanding simply how grabbers/grippers worked seemed like a good enough place to start…
I often do these like chaotic jags through hyperspace when I’m figuring out a problem like this, usually through combinations of high speed skimming across tons of YouTube videos and image searches and asking ChatGPT for the names of things or principles that seem relevant. I end up with tons of good reference materials very chaotically organized though, and thought I’d want through some of them here for my own understanding if nothing else.
I actually found this one late in the process, but it is very helpful in demonstrating disassembly and functioning of one of those gripper dealies you might see senior citizens use, and which are actually surprisingly precise if you’ve ever used one:
There is something called Bowden cables, which are what makes the brakes on bikes work that is at play here, and in a very rudimentary way in my Grabbit-1 prototype. Where a cable or wire is inside of a length of tubing, and when one end of the wire is pulled (or pushed), that movement/force is transmitted through to the other end. It’s like if you connected two pieces together by a rigid rod, except its malleable, and the tubing lets you potentially put a bunch of these kinds of control cables together for different sets of discrete or connected movements. (Also see this guy’s interesting uses of Bowden cables in some kind of marble mechanism.) But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I wish they showed the other end of the cables controlling that motion, but I suppose it must be something like the frames with rings in the retro mechanical puppetry video above.
I also realized during this process that, as cool as it is to make hands that move in a lifelike way, depending on what I ultimately decide the exoskeleton project requires, I might or might not even need them. In one sense, a robotic human-ish hand is not really the ideal mechanism to hold a drawing device… Simply clipping a paint marker or whatever onto an arm or stylus or something is in many ways easier and a more reliable – but also somewhat less “awesome” looking than the above video, or this one which rules:
This is basically the same principle for cable controls, and the cables run through eyelets instead of tubing, and then they actuate levers linked to the larger arm joints. Here’s another video showing more or less the same setup in a different configuration. (This Instructable to build giant wooden hands is somewhat similar and has some close up photos. And this one is crazy in that it translates the hand motion down to a tiny scale articulated hand that has very creepy cool vibes.)
The basic grabber mechanism also appears in another important medical context: prosthetics for amputees. Some good example videos of how that works for body-controlled grippers:
I found out through that avenue of research that there are (at least) two types of gripper mechanisms like this, what’s called Voluntary Open (VO) and Voluntary Closed (VC). In voluntary open mechanisms, my understanding is they are in a default closed position and you need to exert effort which opens the mechanism. Voluntary closed is the opposite: they are default open and when effort is applied, they close. And then in either type, springs return the mechanism to its original state/position when the cable pressure is released.
This diagram helps somewhat:
As many diagrams, photos, and videos that I checked though, I couldn’t viscerally understand how these things function until I actually built it and tried it out and saw what happened.
For my design, you can see two videos at the original Imgur link at top of post, one where the Grabbit-1 functions normally (open by default, Voluntary Closed), and then another one where based on that prosthetic video above, I put a rubber band around the gripper, so that it would automatically be closed as its default, and actuating the little white knob (a cabinet handle repurposed) would make it open (e.g., Voluntary Open).
Now I get it after building it, which is what’s so valuable about doing these rudimentary exercises. Once I can feel how each thing functions in real space, and in comparison to my body, and to the finished art pieces that I produce with them, then I’m able to really fully absorb it, move onto the next, and eventually combine them all together in novel combinations (I haven’t even gotten to gears yet!).
Couple other things worth throwing in here at the end of this largely non-linear rant: there’s a type of arm in robotics referred to as the continuum or snake-arm which moves like a snake or robot trunk or tentacle.
Bear in mind, you can build one of these continuum robots like this which operates only mechanically, meaning no motors or electronics. It’s all just based on manipulating tension on cables. Here’s another one with less complex controller, and consequent less range of motion, but with wood parts:
I find all of this shit endlessly fascinating, and feel like this is such a healthy obsession to have and explore to its fullest as I continue building robots that can survive the coming Butlerian Jihad. Honestly, I’m having a lot more fun with this lately than with regular old boring generative AI. This all feels so much more basic and fundamental, and yet, speaks to many of the same questions in the end, but with the pieces on the board re-arranged in different configurations that throw new light – for me anyway – on the whole conflagration of issues around automation and extension technologies. A great deal more to say on that another day.
Also here is the very much obligatory Star Wars Luke’s robotic replacement hand video to end on:
I started this fish carving when I was 14, so some 31 years ago now. At the time, I lacked proper carving tools, so I wasn’t able to get too much dimension out of it… I should have taken a photo of it before I started the recent updates, but I didn’t. Here’s an in-progress shot of it today after going in with a Kutzall flame burr on my new Dremel tool, followed by a sanding barrel and carving knife. I have some other bits I will try out for more definition on it tomorrow, and then will probably just finish with some linseed oil as a sealer.
I also built a simple downdraft table for sanding, etc. which my shop vac plugs into to keep things clean(ish) during this process.
I’m excited to be able to get this level of detail, and imagine over time my technique will get a lot better. It will also be awesome to be able to combine more artistic carving with my wood robot & automata mechanisms. Stay tuned…
