mike estee

In Othernews

After two years of giant art projects, running away to join the circus, too much minecraft, and the occasional robot contract, I’ve re-entered the world of gainful employment. I’m working at a little independant research lab situated in a former pipe organ factory, called Otherlab.

It’s an amazingly quirky little spot, doing everything from advanced robotics research, to electric vehicles, solar energy and education. I’m working on the education part. We’re working on building a platform to lower the cost and increase the accessibility of science, technology, engineering and math education. As a self-taught engineer, this is a topic very near and dear to my heart.

The project is part of DARPA’s educational initiative, MENTOR. We have three goals. First, to build an extremely low cost CNC machine that can cut out cardboard patterns. Second, a set of projects that kids, adults, and the general public can build using this machine. Third, a platform where they can document their experience, what they learned along the way, and share it with other people in a way that allows the knowledge base to collective advance and grow.

It’s got some lofty goals, and we have a very short amount of time to do it in. This is probably why I missed an internet debate about my project that flared up recently. It started with the following post from Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman:

“It’s official. I’m greatly saddened that I won’t be able to help at this year’s US Maker Faires after they applied for and accepted a grant from DARPA. I look forward to working and playing at Maker Faire again, after they are no longer associated with DARPA.”

He goes on later to say,

“My main reason for making my decision public is to encourage public discussion on this important topic. I’m glad it’s working. We really need to consciously make choices on what we do for money. In my mind, it is not about the money. My hope is that we do what we do because we are exploring and doing what we love (whatever that means to you!).”

Sure, I suppose we can spend some time discussing this. It’s a sentiment I’ve seen pop up in a few places, not just around government attention, but corporate attention as well. This is how I personally feel about it:

Over the last decade, I’ve watched the Maker community slowly growing into something really wonderful. I’ve watched friends start hackerspaces, build open source hardware businesses, and countless folks go out into the world and make amazing things. The rest of society has started to wake up and take notice. From big business, to the government, to hollywood: everyone wants to know what we’re about. They want in because frankly, I think we’re winning.

Maker culture is spreading, and there are a lot of newcomers. I think its only natural that many of its early leaders would feel nervous about all this new attention. After all, we built this new world up because the old one didn’t work for us, and we don’t want to see it ruined. Not an unreasonable fear, but rather than jealously defending the tree fort, I think we should be inviting them in.

It’s going to be a bumpy ride at times. Not everyone is going get our ideals, and our values. We’re going to have some weird conversations, like when we explain to big business how giving away all their intellectual property creates more market opportunity, not less. However, these conversations are going to happen, weather we want them to or not, and the participation culture should include all of society, not just the San Francisco hackers with funky dyed hair^*.

This is why I think working on the MENTOR project is awesome. I like its goals: improve STEM education in America with open technology. (I even hear we get bonus points if it improves it elsewhere…) We’re trying to bring the DIY culture to the classroom.

I’m not afraid of big business, or our government, or the entertainment industry coming in and “ruining” our culture. I think our ideals are more resilient than that. I’m afraid of missing an opportunity to change theirs.

Who knows, I might even learn something from them as well. It’s what sharing ideas is all about.

*It’s currently red, in case you where wondering.

How To Build a Cardboard Quadcopter

Keeping with our recent all-multirotor all-the-time theme, it’s time for another how-to post! Plans are afoot, and scheming has been schemed. The flying robot skeletons have been piling up in a corner of the workshop, and after several revisions we’ve narrowed down the design to something worth sharing.

"Eventually, we'll get it right."

Maybe you want to build your own? Maybe you want to take this design and mod it for agility, weight, or style. Awesome. First, here’s the base pattern:

Getting Started

First off, you’ll need some tools:

• CNC laser cutter. In theory, you could cut these parts out with an x-acto knife, which is madness. You’ll want to borrow a laser cutter. Honestly, you should just buy one. They’re the absolute best thing in the world, and the prices are dropping very fast. Check out Hurricane Laser, for example. Or TechShop.
• Scissors, for cutting tape.
• Soldering iron, and solder.
• A can of Super77 spray glue.
• 60degree hole chamfer. Handheld is fine.

You’ll need the following build materials. For my examples, I use cardboard sheeting from ULINE.

• Several sheets of 4mm cardboard. The thickness matters, if you change the thickness, make sure you update the tab cutouts to match. They’re 3x the thickness, or 12mm.
• Brown paper packing tape for sealing the edges. The clear stuff doesn’t stick very well. You can also use fiber reinforced tape.
• 4×4″x1/8″ black ABS plastic sheet. You can also use heavy card stock, sheet metal, acrylic, or aluminum bar stock.
• No. 127 Black ESD or similar. 7”x1/8″
• One 14oz ZipLock plastic container, or other lightweight 5″ diameter bowl.
• Double sided copper clad PCB board, you’ll need about a 0.5×0.5″ square piece.
• 4 paperclips.

For electronic components, you’ll need the following:

• 4ea 22mm brushless outrunner motors. I’ve used both Cobra 1300kV and DiyDrones 850kV motors.
• 4ea matching prop adapters for your motors and propellers.
• 4ea regular propellers. GWS 8×3, GemFan 10×45, etc. Yes, 4ea. You’ll want extras, lots of extras. You’ll break a lot of props at first.
• 4ea reverse propellers.
• 4ea ESC controllers for your motors, with an on board BEC. I use 20A NextLevel controllers.
• 20mm heatshrink, for the covering the copper clad power board. Electrical tape works too.
• 6mm heatshink for covering connectors and wires.
• 0.1″ spacing jumper wires, female socket. For the battery power sense line.
• Controller board. I use the Quadrino Zoom.
• Cable assembly for Quadrino Zoom.
• Spread spectrum 2.4ghz transmitter and receiver. 6 channel or better. Spektrum DX6i, etc. There are 4 control channels, and 2 mode channels. You’ll need another two channels if you want to add head tracking later.
• 2-4ea, 2000-1300mAh 3S LiPo battery. Trust me, you’ll want more than one. Your motors must match the battery voltage. I use Turnigy batteries.
• Lipo battery charger.
• Battery connector plug and wires. I use XT60 plugs.
• Sparkfun Blutooth module, if you want wireless telemetry. Totally optional.
• Nylon mesh wire sleeve. I use this to protect the motor leads from prop strikes. Also optional.

(GoogleDocs spreadsheet.)

It’s a lot of parts and pieces, it’s true. Depending on where you source things from, and how fast your shipping times are, it can take up to a month for all the parts and pieces to arrive. HobbyKing has notoriously long wait times, for example. If you care about customer service and speed, order domestic. I recommend Innov8tive Designs.

Got all your parts and pieces? Great! Let’s get started…

(^**Hey, what’s with those holes in the picture? How come they’re not in the plans? Turns out the tend to cause frame failure for really hard landings, so I took ‘em out. Amazingly, it still flew after one of the arms bent…)

Cardboard Tricopter Build Plans

Joachim here,

This tricopter frame design is decently ridged, it’s not extremely crash resistant, but it does fine with a few hard landings. This is the first flying revision, so there is plenty of room for design improvements. Improve and share! Available under a creative commons ShareAlike-NonComm-Attrib license.

Source files here: 24cmTrV2.zip

You’ll also need a few build materials:

• Lasers, or a lot of time and a sharp knife.
• Glue: less is more!
• Itoya- O’Glue, school glue, etc.. some kind of water based glue
• Hot melt glue – hot glue gun
• CA glue – super glue
• 3.2mm rod, carbon fiber, fiberglass, wood, or a glue-able plastic

Arms are each made from 4 laminations of 3mm cardboard. To better resist bending, cut the outer two arm laminations parallel to the corrugation, and the inner two perpendicular.

Cut 5 base plates and 1 top plate. Three of the base plates will go on the bottom part of the frame, and the other two will combine with the top plate to make the upper part. For maximum durability, rotate each plate lamination 120 degrees so that the corrugations criss-cross when you glue them. You may need to adjust the motor mounts and servo profile in the tail arm to match your parts.

Total cut list:

• 4 arms parallel to corrugation
• 4 arms perpendicular to corrugations
• 2 tail arms parallel to corrugation
• 2 tail arms perpendicular to corrugations
• 5 base plates
• 1 top plate
• 1 set servo retainers – 1.4mm cardstock
• 2 motor mounts – 1.4mm cardstock
• 1 tail assembly top and bottom – 1.4mm cardstock

For the laminations use a moderate amount of water based glue – Itoya-O’Glue is nice. You could use spray adhesive too, but it’s $18/can.

Press:
Get two sheets of something really flat, i.e. some scrap acrylic sheet you have laying around. Sandwich your newly glued arms and plates between two of these flat sheets and put a good number of books and heavy things on top (~15kg). This will press the glue into any voids and keep your structural members straight as they dry. If you used the water-based glue, leave the arms to dry for about 24hrs, no peeking!

Frame:
Now that you’ve waited 24hrs for your parts to dry, retrieve them! As long as you were somewhat careful when you aligned the laminations, you should be able dry assemble your tricopter frame plates and arms. I start gluing the base plate and arms together with about 3mm gap between them- I squirt some hot glue into that gap and press the parts together. Work fast, hot glue works a lot better when it is hot!

Motor mounts:
Adjust the mounts to fit your motors. Mount your motors to the motor mounts, glue the mounts to the arms with hot melt glue.

Tail yaw assembly, the hard part:
Cut the rod to about 4.5cm or so and slide on your hinge parts, rotating them 180 degrees from each other. The hinge elements should rotate relatively easily but not be loose, or really stiff. Line up the rod flush with the first top tail plate hinge element. Line up your hinge elements with the tail hinge plate top and bottom. Make sure all the hinge elements are straight. Use CA to carefully glue hinge elements to the top and bottom, don’t get glue on the rod! Double check that everything is lined up and let the glue fully set. Now that the glue is set, double check that the rod is aligned with the first top plate hinge element. Carefully glue *only* the top hinge elements to the rod. Trim your servo horn so that its splined hub can fit on the front top hinge element co-axial with the rod, it might help if you sand away any surface features from the servo horn. Double check your alignment and glue the servo horn to the front plate. Allow the glue to set.

Make sure that the servo is centered by connecting it to a powered neutral RX channel.

Carefully partially test fit the hinge on the servo, don’t push it on all the way, I doubt it would survive removal from a snug shaft. Make sure that your hinge is co-axial with the servo splined shaft. You might need to add a shim to the bottom of the hinge or trim the arm a bit to make sure the hinge and servo are co-axial. Carefully fit the hinge hub onto the shaft. I use hot melt glue to glue hinge bottom to the tail arm.

Attach your electronics and go flying!

Additional Resources
Some tricopter fundamentals by David Windestål – http://www.rcexplorer.se

• http://rcexplorer.se/Educational/kkguide/kkguide/tri.html
• http://www.rcexplorer.se/projects/tricopterv25/tricopterv25.html
• http://www.rcexplorer.se/Educational/HKKK/HKKK.html

Joachimp’s parts:

Cardboard TriCopter

Hot damn!

My friend Joachim P., taking some inspiration from the cardboard quad, decided to build a paper tri-copter. Using a pretty ingenious tail tilt mount, his Tri-copter comes in at 357g fully loaded. It also costs around 130$ (sans transmitter.)

Of course, he’s using a gyro only board (the KKmicrocopter controller), so one could probably get a lot more stability with 6DOF or 9DOF board, but I’m impressed none the less.

UPDATE: Build plans are are in the next post. Thank’s Joachim!

Cardboard Quadcopter

I finished another frame this afternoon. Now that I’ve made a few of these, the turn around time is getting shorter.

A new set of shoes.

This time with rubber-band shock landing gear, and card-stock motor mounts. They work better than the old aluminum ones from the previous frame. A friend with a bit more flying experience than I came over to help me grab this video.

The paper shocks aren’t holding up very well, but I think I can fix that.

Cardboard. It’s awesome.

Update: We took it outside and got some test video, this little guy really performs!

Paper Robots, Part 4

It took a few round, and I went down a few dead ends, but today I finally managed to make a flying paper robot. Originally, I started out with a flying sphere design copied wholesale from the JDM Flying Sphere. Eventually I figured out that I didn’t know the first damn thing about making a flying robot and that it would probably make a bit of sense to try and build one that had been successfully flown by more than one other person working for the Japanese military.

So, I decided to build a quadcopter. A few people have built those, and it looked like a simpler problem.

The hardest part about getting started with quadcopters is choosing which of the half-dozen or so control platforms best describes you as a quadcopter enthusiast. I settled on the ArduPilot Mega v2. Then I settled on the MultiWii based Quadrino. Both are perfectly capable of loitering around like a lazy robot, but the Quadrino has a certain simplicity and easy-of-use that I found attractive, so I’ve been using that one the most.

Too big to fail?

As I had a few 750W motors lying around from the flying sphere experiments I decided to build my first quad out of those. This created a few unexpected problems, and a few very dangerous close calls. With 3kW of motor connected to the frame it was very much a robot, in the kill all humans sense of the word. While I did manage to make it hover, I eventually learned my lesson and decided to go with something a little more petite.

It seems that the point of all these paper robot exercises has been to try and find interesting design patterns that one can use to build cheap, reproducible robots with. With that in mind, the hard part about building a paper quadcopter frame was going to be getting it rigid enough to fly with some semblance of control.

Folded triangle failure.

I started with folded up triangle beams, as I had been using these to make legs for the walking robots earlier. Unfortunately, they proved to be difficult to anchor in a cross configuration. I could get one beam rigid, but the other would be split in two. The frame was floppy, and had a very wide profile against the prop downwash, and was a fantastic failure.

After that, I abandon triangles. I decided to try and build laminated cardboard beams in the hopes that they would be rigid enough to make a frame. For some reason I was still hung up on folding, and went with a triangular folded stiffener. It too was a dismal failure. Eventually it became clear, that I was going to have to find some way to make the arms cross each other at the center, and to find some other way of attaching the stiffeners.

In retrospect I probably should have started with slotted construction from the beginning, but sometimes you just have to do things the wrong way first. Maybe it makes for a better story. Maybe it makes figuring out the right way that much more enjoyable once you pull your head out of the… bushes.

Closer...

Hot off the laser, I slotted the new frame together. Already it was considerably stiffer than any of my previous attempts. By gluing the layers together, I could make the frame stiffer still. The final piece in the puzzle was when I remembered a bit about applying polyurethane to paper my friend Pete told me about when I first showed him my walking robots. After applying kraft tape to strengthen the edges of the cardboard, I sprayed the frame down 3-4 times with an oil based polyurethane wood finish. At 52 grams, the final frame was incredibly light, water proof, and very, very rigid. Surprisingly so!

Stronger, faster, lighter.

Impatient for my HobbyKing order to arrive, I purchased a set of 2213/34 Cobra motors from Innov8tive Designs, (highly recommended. Thanks again for the advice!), and set about integrating the electronics. This involved finding a way to attach 4 motor controllers, a radio, battery, and the control board onto the paper frame. It needed to be done in a way that wouldn’t compromise frame integrity, be easily serviceable, and survive multiple crash landings from operator and software error.

By notching the stiffener plates I found a novel way to use large black rubber bands to secure various elements to the frame. They have proven to be very versatile in holding ESCs, cables, and even heavy 4S battery packs to the underside of the frame. The 1.75 cup ZipLock plastic container that acts as the crash dome is even secured with rubber bands.

(Photo by Audrey Penven)

You got to get up to get down.

Without the battery, this little guy weighs 600 grams and pushes approximately 2400. With the hulking 4S lipo pack installed it comes in just under 900 grams and takes off at about 1/3 throttle. As the motors are small enough, I can fly indoors. The motor mounts where the only part where I resorted to using sheet metal, but I’m fairly confident they can be replaced with a heavy card stock. I can probably knock another 50-100 grams off the frame by replacing the cable harness as well.

…but that’s for another day. Now, I must go outside and fly.

Update:
If you’d like to make your own, here are the flat patterns. FlyingPaper.pdf

Open Source Parametric CAD

A little while ago I was sitting in a local cafe eating breakfast. I had my calipers, laptop, and a hobby brushless motor controller out in front of me. I carefully measured each dimension, adding bits of geometry between bites of pancake. Eventually, what started out as a simple cube on my screen, started to resemble an accurate model of the object I held in my hand.

"When bits become atoms."

As I finished eating breakfast, a women in her late twenties came up and introduced herself. Completely fascinated, she had been watching this unfold and wanted to know what it was she had seen, “I had no idea that was how things where made! It looks so complicated. I always assumed someone just… took a picture or something.” I explained to her how everything around her in the last twenty years more complicated than a paperclip was once a model in a computer. She left with a huge grin on her face. I like to imagine she went about her day, looking at the things in her world in a whole new way.

This got me thinking. Why don’t more people have the tools to design their world? It is invisible to most of us, but it shouldn’t be. Look around you. Every car. Every building. Every toothbrush, office chair, markerboard pen, laptop, television, overpass, and can opener. They all once started as a computer model. Once you’ve gotten past the why part of having an idea, it’s the first step in finding the how in build something.

A missing piece.

So why is this important? With the rise of 3D printing and laser cutting, more and more people have access to low skill manufacturing machines. Machines that can build very complicated objects, cheaply, with little or no training. Unfortunately, the software necessary to tell those machines what to build is still very expensive, difficult to use, and out of reach for most people.

So what is a Parametric CAD Modeller anyway? Parametric CAD is software that uses (mostly) two dimensional sketches to build up three dimensional forms. The parametric part is where the relationships between the circles, squares, and lines in the 2D drawings are formulas. This allows one to say, build a propeller where the number of prop-blades can be changed with one number. Or a coffee mug, where you can specify how much coffee you want it to hold. You can specify that the handle is always attached to the side of the coffee mug, and that the mug always has a bottom. In a sense, parametric CAD is a visual programming language for describing all things. Well, most of them anyway.

Making these tools more accesible to more people will require overcoming two immense hurdles. The first is the cost. Parametric modellers are very, very expensive. This means that unless someone else has the same very expensive CAD package as you, you won’t be able to effectively share your fancy widget with them. The other side effect of this is that it creates vendor lock-in, and dramatically increases the barrier to entry.

The second, and harder problem, is usability. If our goal is to make product design more accessible to more people, then we’re going to have to make great strides in how people learn CAD, and how they interact with CAD modellers.

Taking a survey of currently available PLM packages (that’s “Product Lifecycle Managment” in industry-speak) and you notice something about them. They’re massively complicated & opaque interfaces designed for professionals who will have spent hundreds to thousands of hours learning their idiosyncrasies and capabilities. These interfaces, while they all share some common functionality, have each taken their own separate evolutionary path. Sometimes with maddening results.

Of course, an interface capable of describing All Things is going to have an inherent level of irreducible complexity. At some point, a new user is going to have to learn how to make three dimensional shapes out of two dimensional drawings. They’re going to have to learn how a thing is made up out of a collection of features, and how these features will have dependencies. They’re going to have to do a lot of learning. That’s okay, we can make that process easier.

Parametric CAD is expensive and hard to use, let’s address the expensive part first.

Open source development cycles have shown time and time again, that they are capable of building highly reliable, highly functional and extremely complex systems. Like the web browser you’re reading this on. Or the operating system in your phone. Already, there are a few OSS CAD projects under way. As it pertains to our particular problem, currently there is OpenCASCADE.

OpenCASCADE is a parametric kernel. It’s the code that does The Math and provides the core logic used to describe All Things. Around that you will need some sort of user interface to talk to the kernel. Some way to describe what you want it to do. This is an area where open source software doesn’t do as well. There are lots of reasons for this.

I think the core difficulty is that the motivational forces which compel individual unpaid contributors to work on a complex project are generally at odds with good UI design. At the end of the day, a single person is going to sit in front of a computer screen and try and figure out how to use an interface. This person is going to have to figure out the motivations which lead to certain UI design decisions. Decisions made by many individual contributors. This creates a many-to-one mapping of design decisions, and generally leads to software that requires a CS degree to understand.

If an open source project does have a UI designer, this designer is further hamstrung by having little real power to keep the design on course. Motivating volunteers to throw out their pet feature because its not right for the end user is a good way to end up volunteerless. UX (user experience) design is an area of computer science that is fraught with “Armchair Experts”, as it frequently appears subjective to those unfamiliar with design principles. This leads to lots of heated discussions about a particular design direction, and often creates this situation where it’s just easier to keep everyone’s pet feature in a preference somewhere rather than settle on one model. Of course, there are examples of OSS projects with good UI, but they’re overwhelmingly single contributor projects.

So how do you build good UI and still have your OSS cake too?

My thought was that one might be able to use Kickstarter to pre-fund a particular design direction. It works like this: a design group creates a UI specification for an area of functionality. This is usually a document describing behaviors, structure, and user experience flow, as well as target users and their motivations & backgrounds which will govern the design. It often includes example animations to illustrate the behaviors and functionality. Then, that design document is taken to Kickstarter, and the community is asked to fund the salary for the required number of engineers to implement the design round. When it’s done, the software is released out into the open. If the design has been implemented and executed well, the community will be motivated to donate more for the next round. If not, the engineers move on to something else. As the previous round is open source, another group is free to take the product in a new direction if needed.

This allows the direction of the software to be controlled by the people who use it in a very, very direct manner. The difficult part in making this work of course, is convincing the community to bootstrap the first round. A design/engineering team will be trading on reputation. The project will still require lots of volunteer help, and the there are still lots of other problems, but does solve one problem: a clear direction, attached to a customer base willing to support it.

Might work, might be a dismal failure, but I think its an interesting idea worth more thought.

Dorkbot SF

I’ll be giving a short talk on my paper robots tonight at dorkbotsf. Here are a few of the flat patterns should you wish to try and make some paper hexapods of your own. Have fun!

• Universal Joint
• Cardboard Hexapod
• Rubberband Leg
• Flat-fold 1DOF Leg
• Cardstock Hexapod Frame
• Corona-939-PaperServoMount

On Bike Seats and Ball Bearings

I left my bike in a bad part of town yesterday. I forgot about it after meeting up with my significant other, and abandoned it out on the street all night. When I woke up this morning and went to go retrieve it, the seat was stolen. To my pleasant surprise, the rest of the bike was still there. As the French like to say, c’est la vie.

What’s funny about this, is that in all likelihood, I was having a conversation with my roommate about stolen bike seats during the time frame this was happening. He told me about an interesting theft prevention method for all those things on your bike bolted down with socket head screws. Your handlebars, your seat post, your brakes, etc.

The trick requires some ball bearings, and some super glue. You’ll want 1/8″ and 3/16″ chrome alloy ball bearings. You can find these at your local hardware store. You’ll also need some cyanoacrylate, aka superglue. Also available at your local hardware store. The way this works, is you super glue the appropriate sized ball bearing into the socket head, and put some superglue in to secure it. Then, when some entrepreneuring crack-head decides that your seat post is the most economical manner in which they can acquire crack; they spend a few moments being confused that their allen wrench doesn’t fit, and you keep your bike seat.

Of course, someday you may want to adjust your seat-post, or replace your handle bars. Personally, the only time I find myself doing this is when I’m replacing my old stolen seat with a new one. On the rare occasion you do need to upgrade or adjust things, you’ll have to soak the superglued ball bearing in acetone, and then use a large magnet to retrieve it from the socket.

Of course, that’s a pain in the ass. Which is precisely the point.

Hanging Around In Brooklyn

It’s been five months since the whirlwind adventure that was the Edinburgh Fringe Fest. I’ve decided to take a break from robots and head back to NYC to hang out with The Paper Dolls. This time in Brooklyn. They’re working on a new doubles act for aerial silk slated to debut at the House Of Yes for The Sky Box‘s monthly cabaret show.

It looks like the website is a little out of date, but doors are at 8:00pm. If you find yourself near Williamsburg this Thursday the 19th, I highly encourage you to wax your mustache, hop on your fixie, and ride on over to 342 Maujer St for some high skills aerials.

I’m pretty excited for it. They’ve spent the last couple of years working on the arduous task of combing aerial dance, with classical theatre. This often necessitates reducing the skill level of the performance quite a bit. Usually to fit the story, but more often to reduce performance risk exposure. That’s a technical term that means roughly means, “you can’t do your hard tricks twice a night for 30 days in a row.” Most big top aerial performances you will see fall under this umbrella. In Edinburgh, I suggested they dust off something more traditional, and so they’ve put together a very complicated doubles routine that takes full advantage of the SkyBox’s towering rigging truss. This is a space purpose built for those out on the cutting edge of the aerial arts. There are no fancy costumes. No complicated theatre hardware. Just 10 meters and 9 points to hang from.

New York is a brutal place to survive as a performing artist, but out on the edges, hidden amongst the warehouses, you can find some amazing things if you look up.