Robots are cool, but what's cooler is figuring out how they work. I truly enjoy engineering and deep-diving into the mechanics, physics, and math that make machines behave the way they do. Sometimes I make things just for fun. Here you'll find some of the projects that I've worked on over the years, starting from the very beginning of my learning journey.
Introduction In my previous project where I built my own 5-DOF robot arm, I learned that the Denavit-Hartenberg method for computing kinematics was quite inefficient as it involved a convoluted frame assignment procedure and many successive transformation matrix multiplications. I also crashed the robot quite…
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Introduction Metrolinx miraculously approved my request for a key for their open API, so I thought it would be fun to build a live dashboard to track the positions of their vehicles across Ontario. Unfortunately, I shut down the dashboard because the amount of data…
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Introduction This is a hobby project where I designed and built a custom 5-DOF 3D printed robot arm, as well as a graphical user interface (GUI) to control the robot arm. The purpose is to explore communication protocols, robot kinematics (D-H method), and learn software…
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Introduction I ran out of things to print so I decided to experiment with custom motion control on my 3D printer. I wrote a Python interface that enables scripting chains of custom gcode commands. This was actually more complicated to do than I expected because…
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Introduction Harmonic gearboxes are marvels of engineering that have always fascinated me. It's amazing that someone thought "hey, let's make a FLEXIBLE gear" and it worked. Naturally, I had to try to make my own to better understand it. A flexible PLA cup with 82…
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Introduction In an early startup venture (prior to any investor funding), I designed grippers to be mounted on a Dobot CR3 collaborative robot for extremely low-budget tech demonstrations. Simulation videos were hard to sell, so physical demonstrations were required. The grippers were used to showcase…
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Introduction This was my first endeavor involving machine vision. The Raspberry Pi-controlled robot uses OpenCV to process images and detect faces using a pre-trained Haar cascade classifier. Servo motors are controlled using an I2C interface board (it was what was available to power them separately)…
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Using the popular IKEA LACK table enclosure as inspiration, I built my own rendition using fully custom parts. The enclosure features fully functional doors with integrated magnets, and passthrough cutouts for power and filament. The purpose was to isolate the printer from dust and drafts…
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