Robots Hacks

2393 Articles

BLDC wire winding machine

Making A Brushless DC Motor Winding Machine

June 17, 2025 by 35 Comments

Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Yuchi] is building an STM32 BLDC motor winding machine.

This machine is for winding brushless motors because manual winding is highly labor intensive. The machine in turn is made from four brushless motors. He is using the SimpleFOC library to implement closed-loop angle control. Closed-loop torque control is also used to maintain correct wire tension.

The system is controlled by an STM32G431 microcontroller. The motor driver used is the DRV8313. There are three GBM5208 75T Gimbal motors for close-loop angle control, and one BE4108 60T Gimbal motor for torque control. The torque control motor was built with this machine! [Yuchi] says that the Gimbal motors used are designed to be smooth, precise, and powerful at low speeds.

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Red and black grabber combat robot

Step Into Combat Robotics With Project SVRN!

June 11, 2025 by 4 Comments

We all love combat robotics for its creative problem solving; trying to fit drivetrains and weapon systems in a small and light package is never as simple as it appears to be. When you get to the real lightweights… throw everything you know out the window! [Shoverobotics] saw this as a barrier for getting into the 150g weight class, so he created the combat robotics platform named Project SVRN.

You want 4-wheel drive? It’s got it! Wedge or a Grabber? Of course! Anything else you can imagine? Feel free to add and modify the platform to your heart’s content! Controlled by a Malenki Nano, a receiver and motor controller combo board, the SVRN platform allows anyone to get into fairyweight fights with almost no experience.

With 4 N10 motors giving quick control, the platform acts as an excellent platform for various bot designs. Though the electronics and structure are rather simple, the most important and impressive part of Project SVRN is the detailed documentation for every part of building the bot. You can find and follow the documentation yourself from [Shoverobotics]’s Printables page here!

If you already know every type of coil found in your old Grav-Synthesized Vex-Flux from your Whatsamacallit this might not be needed for you, but many people trying to get into making need a ramp to shoot for the stars. For those needing more technical know-how in combat robotics, check out Kitten Mittens, a bot that uses its weapon for locomotion!

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Origami assembly line.

Building An Assembly Line For Origami Pigeons

June 9, 2025 by 12 Comments

When it comes to hacks, the best ones go to extremes. Either beautiful in their simplicity, or magnificent in their excess. And, well, today’s hack is the latter: excessive. [HTX Studio] built an assembly line for origami pigeons!

One can imagine the planning process went something like this:

  1. Make origami pigeon assembly line
  2. ?
  3. Profit

But whatever the motivation, this is an impressive and obviously very well engineered machine. Even the lighting is well considered. It’s almost as if it were made for show…

Now, any self-respecting nerd should know the difference between throughput and latency. From what we could glean from the video, the latency through this assembly line is in the order of 50 seconds. Conservatively it could probably have say 5 birds in progress at a time. So let’s say every 10 seconds we have one origami pigeon off the assembly line. This is a machine and not a person so it can operate twenty four hours a day, save downtime for repairs and maintenance, call it 20 hours per day. We could probably expect more than 7,000 paper pigeons out of this machine every day. Let’s hope they’ve got a buyer lined up for all these birds.

If you’re interested in assembly lines maybe we could interest you in a 6DOF robotic arm, or if the origami is what caught your eye, check out the illuminating, tubular, or self-folding kind!

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3D Pen Used To Build Cleaning Robot That Picks Up Socks

June 6, 2025 by 11 Comments

Your average 3D printer is just a nozzle shooting out hot  plastic while being moved around by a precise robotic mechanism. There’s nothing stopping you replacing the robot and moving around the plastic-squirting nozzle yourself. That’s precisely what [3D Sanago] did to produce this cute little robot.

The beginning of the video sets the tone. “First we create the base that will become the robot vacuum’s body,” explains [3D Sanago]. “I quickly and precisely make a 15 x 15 cm square almost as if I were a 3D printer.” It’s tedious and tiring to move the 3D printing pen through the motions to build simple parts, but that’s the whole gimmick here. What’s wild is how good the results are. With the right post-processing techniques using an iron, [3D Sanago] is able to produce quite attractive plastic parts that almost justify the huge time investment.

The robot itself works in a fairly straightforward fashion. It’s got four gear motors driving four omniwheels, which let it pan around in all directions with ease. They’re under command of an Arduino Uno paired with a multi-channel motor driver board. The robot also has a servo-controlled arm for moving small objects. The robot lacks autonomy. Instead, [3D Sanago] gave it a wireless module so it could be commanded with a PS4 controller. Despite being referred to as a “robot vacuum,” it’s more of a general “cleaning robot” since it only has an arm to move objects, with no actual vacuum hardware. It’s prime use? Picking up socks.

We’ve seen [3D Sanago]’s fine work before, too. Video after the break.

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A Lego vehicle crossing a gap between two benches.

Making A LEGO Vehicle Which Can Cross Large Gaps

June 3, 2025 by 6 Comments

Here is a hacker showing off their engineering chops. This video shows successive design iterations for a LEGO vehicle which can cross increasingly large gaps.

At the time of writing this video from [Brick Experiment Channel] has been seen more than 110,000,000 times, which is… rather a lot. We guess with a view count like that there is a fairly good chance that many of our readers have already seen this video, but this is the sort of video one could happily watch twice.

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ManiPylator focusing its laser pointer at a page.

Simulation And Motion Planning For 6DOF Robotic Arm

June 3, 2025 by 11 Comments

[Leo Goldstien] recently got in touch to let us know about a fascinating update he posted on the Hackaday.io page for ManiPylator — his 3D printed Six degrees of freedom, or 6DOF robotic arm.

This latest installment gives us a glimpse at what’s involved for command and control of such a device, as what goes into simulation and testing. Much of the requisite mathematics is introduced, along with a long list of links to further reading. The whole solution is based entirely on free and open source (FOSS) software, in fact a giant stack of such software including planning and simulation software on top of glue like MQTT message queues.

The practical exercise for this installment was to have the arm trace out the shape of a heart, given as a mathematical equation expressed in Python code, and it fared quite well. Measurements were taken! Science was done!

We last brought you word about this project in October of 2024. Since then, the project name has changed from “ManiPilator” to “ManiPylator”. Originally the name was a reference to the Raspberry Pi, but now the focus is on the Python programming language. But all the bot’s best friends just call him “Manny”.

If you want to get started with your own 6DOF robotic arm, [Leo] has traced out a path for you to follow. We’d love to hear about what you come up with!

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Mark Setrakian and Adam Savage investigate a massive prop hand

17 Year Old Hellboy II Prop Still Amazes

May 30, 2025 by 7 Comments

The AI effects we know these days were once preceded by CGI, and those were once preceded by true hand-built physical props. If that makes you think of Muppets, this video will change your mind. In a behind-the-scenes look with [Adam Savage], effects designer [Mark Setrakian] reveals the full animatronic glory of Mr. Wink’s mechanical fist from Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) – and this beast still flexes.

Most of this arm was actually made in 2003, when 3D printing was very different than what we think of today. Printed on a Stratasys Titan – think: large refrigerator-sized machine, expensive as sin – the parts were then hand-textured with a Dremel for that war-scarred, brutalist feel. This wasn’t just basic animatronics for set dressing. This was a fully actuated prop with servo-driven finger joints, a retractable chain weapon, and bevel-geared mechanisms that scream mechanical craftsmanship.

Each finger is individually designed. The chain reel: powered by a DeWalt drill motor and custom bevel gear assembly. Every department: sculptors, CAD modelers, machinists, contributed to this hybrid of analog and digital magic. Props like this are becoming unicorns.

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