Xinzhiyuan report
Editor: Peach Layan
[Introduction] The missing persons are back! Huawei's "genius boy" Zhihuijun brought a cute and hard desktop robot ElectronBot this time.
Remember the "full-stack self-developed" Iron Man robotic arm Dummy that stitched grapes last time?
Huawei's "genius boy" Zhihui Jun, who hasn't updated for nearly 3 months, is here with his latest video!
Although he bounced for a while, he still came. Netizens said: "The missing persons are returning."
This project is called ElectronBot, which is a branch project. Zhihui-jun said that the overall difficulty is not high.
Why not take a look at the overall effect?
How are "electronic" robots made?
Before starting the project, Zhihui Jun briefly introduced the motivation for choosing this project. He joked: "This is a story of picking up a mouse pad and trying to match it with a computer."
As we all know, Zhihui Jun is keen to collect all kinds of "screens". This time, he got a circular LCD screen from nowhere.
In a flash of inspiration, Lord Zhihui's DNA moved.
Simple watches and pendants can no longer satisfy him. He intends to make a novel, "cute and hard" robot.
Part of his inspiration comes from the popular "Anki Vector" in the early years, the dialogue robot "Kirobo Mini" launched by Toyota, the music egg "Rolly" once launched by Sony, and the mini robot "Robi" that looks like Astro Boy. etc.
However, Chih-Hui-Jun said that these robots have too simple functions, and are not very scalable and open.
He plans to design a desktop mini-robot himself.
The above-mentioned mini robots are limited by factors such as size, and their computing power is not strong. And if you want to achieve a slightly smarter interaction, you have to rely on the chip of the mobile phone. Zhihui Junrui commented: "It's not elegant enough, nor practical enough."
He wants to design a robot that does not need to be charged, can stand by at any time, and has powerful computing power.
He thought of a way to design the robot as an accessory for a computer. Then you can get the applications on the computer, have its powerful computing power, and always be connected to the USB to charge.
There are such good things, the robot nodded straight after hearing it.
Because the LCD screen is round, a round and cute sci-fi robot prototype is freshly released.
Zhihuijun said that this was his first attempt to model with T-Spline surfaces. The finished robot has movable arms with two degrees of freedom, one for the body and one for the head.
Moreover, Zhihui-Jun can handle it, and he is really stuck with 6 steering gears. This is not easy. With such a small body, Chih-Hui-Jun has thought of many creative transmission solutions.
He hopes that the robot's arm can rotate back and forth and left and right at the same time, and the position of the arm is not enough to fit a servo, so the servo can only be installed in the stomach.
At the same time, Zhihui-jun also hopes that the two angles of the arm can be reversed, so things like the spring torsion spring can only pass.
In order to solve the problem of transmitting the power from the steering gear to the arm in a narrow body, but also to realize the two-way transmission of power, he designed a unique structure.
The movement of the arm forward and backward is transmitted by a steering gear through gear meshing, while the movement in the other orthogonal direction is transmitted by another steering gear through a T-shaped push rod.
Don't underestimate this robot, it didn't waste any space in its stomach, it was stuffed full by Lord Zhihui. It is the gospel of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The base of the robot is machined using aluminum CNC.
The next step is the circuit design.
Zhihuijun used Cortex-M4 core MCU, STM32F4. Used to drive the screen and control the servos and USB communication.
Since the USB function of the chip itself only supports full-speed or low-speed USB, Zhihui Jun added a high-speed USB-PHY chip to the circuit, successfully increasing the theoretical communication rate to 400Mbps. The final actual maximum communication rate is also 300Mbps.
This speed is much higher than short buses such as UART, I^{2}C, and SPI. This also provides more possibilities for subsequent software development.
The design of the main control board is relatively simple, and the two-layer PCB is done. In this way, the volume is minimized, which is consistent with the area of the screen.
Inside the robot's body is also a board of sensors, including a camera, and an infrared gesture sensor.
There is also a driver board. Because the servos on the market can only receive pwm signals for angle control.
This is the problem.
In this case, we can only send commands to make the servo move, but cannot receive commands, so as to know its motion state. At the same time, in order to make the steering gear reverse drive, it is necessary to allow the steering gear to switch the output torque at any time.
Although traditional steering gear can't do this, it can't beat Zhihui-jun, who is ingenious and intelligent. He modified the traditional 3G servo on the market and designed a mini servo driver.
This small driver supports I^{2}C bus communication, PID closed-loop control, position return, and can also set the maximum output torque, power-off storage parameters, and so on.
In this way, the original 6 ordinary steering gears became 6 hot smart steering gears with a little bit of skill by Mr. Zhihui.
At this point, all the hardware should be there, and it is time to assemble.
After watching Zhihui-jun's assembly process, the editor has to sigh, who said that the engineer man is a straight man, it's just that he didn't treat you delicately.
The whole assembly process is really confusing for most people.
Zhihui-jun named the little robot he designed Electron (electronic). Electron is connected to the computer through a USB cable as an accessory of the computer.
In other words, the robot is called "Electronic", and the computer connected via USB is the "brain" of the "Electronic", referred to as...
"computer"! ?
If it's just a player, this robot isn't much different from the ones mentioned earlier.
After all, the original intention of Zhihuijun to design it is to use it as a tool robot and computer accessory, so that it can play some more practical functions.
He developed a complete, multi-layered open SDK for Electronics.
The top layer is Electron Studio, which is a purely graphical interaction.
If you want to control the electron with your own program, Zhihui Jun also provides the Electron Player library. With a very simple code, the robot can be linked and controlled, and the playback content can be set.
If you want to carry out secondary development in a more hard-core way, Zhihui Jun also provides a lower-level Electron LowLevel library.
In this regard, Zhihui Jun also made an example of controlling the volume and brightness of the computer by adjusting the right hand of the robot.
Using the camera and infrared handheld sensor mounted on the robot body, a program to recognize gestures through an AI algorithm was developed.
When you perform different gesture types, you can open pre-set programs or switch desktops.
One of the most interesting applications is that Zhihui Jun developed a program based on OpenPose for single-purpose human key point detection.
If you have 2 robots, you can video, and you can control the robot movement with gestures.
Zhihui-jun also gave this application a special name "quantum entanglement".
In the end, Zhihui-jun also made a storage box for the electronics, which is too delicate.
open source code
At the end of the video, Mr. Zhihui attached the open source address of software and hardware:
https://github.com/peng-zhihui/ElectronBot
It's only been released a few hours, and it already has 90 stars and 6 forks.
It has to be said that the strength of the genius boy is too strong.
For the specific instructions for use, Zhihui-jun said that he would supplement it later, and take a nap first.
Including the self-driving bicycles, robotic arms, etc. that he made before, each project will consume a lot of energy, and Zhihui-jun also has his own job.
Netizens: Redefine "soft core"
Redefine "soft core"
Some netizens hope that next time Zhihui-jun can publish a video on "How to Study Efficiently".
References:
https://b23.tv/SYUguUw
<END>