Making a robot to carve photos into pumpkins

people are saying i'm lucky that my haircut robot didn't carve my face that got me thinking what if it did and instead of my face it was a pumpkin here's the plan take my hair cutting robot and repurpose it with a new business end for example this spindle from a milling machine i'm pretty sure i can use this to make traditional pumpkins by carving out chunks as well as pro pumpkins by varying the depth of cut to control how light passes through the pumpkin in theory i should be able to take any image and carve it into a pumpkin for example a recreation of my wife glaring at me we'll see if she thinks it's as funny as i do i've seen people put a pumpkin into a cnc machine which is hilarious but i've never seen anyone make a custom made machine to carve a pumpkin probably because it's a really dumb thing but i love dumb stuff [Music] if you haven't seen my haircut robot i'll link the video here it's basically a 5-axis cnc machine with a special end that can cut my hair i'm going to remove the hair cutting attachment and replace it with this milling spindle but before that there's just a couple issues to fix with the haircut robot i'm going to make a few select modifications so that it can stand up to the rigors of cnc milling so we barely even started and my master plan has already fallen apart i got into the cad and one thing led to another and the only part left of the robot is the big circular bearing have you ever seen where someone finds a really old airplane underwater from world war ii or something and then they restore it and it's all new parts except for like one piece from the original aircraft this reminds me of that i should also point out that this is an awful way to make a cnc machine even though i stiffened it up this design is very floppy it's not too late to build it another way all right let's just build it i'm going to reuse all the electronics which is nice making this robot uses all the tools it's got machining 3d printing this is a form 3 it makes incredible parts it's got lathe work welding laser cutting this is new cnc routing with the always awesome 24r you might be thinking this is some ancient religious symbol it's actually a new giant gear for rotating the entire cutting head as usual there's lots of plasma cutting the only problem is that my plasma car is broken hey wife yeah i have great news i need to get another plasma cutter how many plasma cutters do you need it's easy yeah just one more i know so is that a yes i can't even keep track of all your tools i'm gonna take that as yes oh and i'm gonna need you to park your car in the driveway what thanks i know just who to call hey siri ask tormach if they'd like to work with me again if you follow my channel you know that my plasma cutter is like my baby and you might be wondering why i would replace my baby with someone else's baby well their babies better it's called the tormach 1300 pl and it's hot off the presses if you have no idea what a plasma cutter is they are awesome they make a high current arc of electricity between a torch and whatever you want to obliterate similar to a tig welder except there's a high speed flow of gas overlapping with the arc this makes the gas super hot and ionized which is why it's called a plasma cutter the super hot gas coming out of the tip is like a juggernaut nothing can stop it it cuts through steel like butter i mainly use this to cut out sheet metal patterns that i bend and weld like origami to very quickly and cheaply make structures so here's why their baby is better it has clear path stepper motors which are really good these are what i used in my basketball robot it uses pathpilot control which is great and it's the same software on all my other cnc machines it has presets this is so simple but such a time saver and it isn't constantly broken all i gotta do is get it horizontal get the legs installed and some side panels connect up the electronics and we're in business it has this tray full of coolant which catches most of the metal smoke you really don't want to breathe it the blue coolant isn't the only thing that looks like a toilet that's how you know it's working check out this sliding water table it makes it possible to cut pipes and big stuff i'm so excited to have this in my arsenal now that that's built let's make some pumpkins all right we finally have a pumpkin carving machine it has all the degrees of freedom to move anywhere on the pumpkin at least in theory the robot can't actually do anything yet i have to write software for it you are so useless right now your mom is useless making the robot is only a small part of the work you can think of it as the appetizer the real meat is the software here's the basic workflow that i'm going for i'd like to be able to draw a picture or maybe take a photo off the internet and cut that into a random pumpkin the rough plan is to put a pumpkin into the robot measure where it is with a special tool in the robot take the picture that i want and somehow map it onto the scanned pumpkin shape then convert that into a series of moves that the robot will dutifully execute with the result being my picture cut into the pumpkin let's talk about mapping a 2d image onto a pumpkin there's actually no way to do this something has to give either to fold the paper or stretch it i'm far from the first person to run into this problem in fact it's been driving flat earthers and cartographers crazy for centuries because the earth is noble spheroid what did you just call me to solve my image wrapping problem i'm going to steal a technique all the way back from 1569 called the mercator projection it's a way to unwrap a sphere onto a piece of paper or vice versa it was invented for maps this is good for this project because when you convert from paper to sphere vertical lines will stay oriented to longitude lines and horizontal lines will stay parallel to latitude lines this isn't necessarily true for other ways of mapping spheres to planes but it's important for my memes to look good the main downside of mercator is that things get squished at the poles because that's where all the longitude lines come together here's what the earth looks like on a mercator projection and this is what the actual size of land masses are i'm okay with this because i plan to do most of my carving away from the poles of the pumpkin like many stem topics trying to read wikipedia to understand a mercator projection is a great way to feel inadequate maybe that's just me i'm not sure here's how it works imagine that i put my sphere inside of a cylinder and inside of my screw there's a light shining out in all directions if there's a little something on the surface of my sphere the light will project it somehow onto the surface of my cylinder the way i've drawn it light will escape out the top but if i make this infinitely long it will capture all of the projections from the light and then if i split the cylinder down the side and unrolled it my map might look something like this i could then squash it down to whatever map size i want and i have a mercator projection that's basically how it works so let's build it i just don't get it why isn't this working i've been banging on this mercator projection code for hours something in the math is just not making any sense all right i found a hack to my problem but it's nasty what i'm doing is that's such a dirty hack it should be illegal all right i can now wrap whatever picture i want around a sphere the problem is that perfectly spherical pumpkins are incredibly rare i have to find a way to deal with pumpkins and all their blobby imperfections if i don't the machine can't possibly cut in the right location or to the correct depth this is where measuring the pumpkin comes into play i made this special tool for the spindle which has a little switch on it with this i can move towards the pumpkin until i see the switch trigger that tells me that i hit the pumpkin i pop this into the robot and probe every nook and cranny of the pumpkin all you do is run tsa.exe keep your hands where i can see them is that a bomb you are a terrorist for every point that i probe i record where the tip was and then that collection of points gives me an estimate of the surface of the pumpkin all right we are almost there now finally i can now take any picture and wrap it onto a sphere and i know where my pumpkin is and what shape it is the tricky bit is how to take my image from the surface of the sphere to the surface of the pumpkin what i do is pretend that the pumpkin is inside of a perfect sphere and the center of the sphere is in the center of the pumpkin for every point that i measured on the surface of the pumpkin i project a ray out to the surface of the sphere and see where it hits the sphere so what this tells me is at this point on the sphere corresponds to this point on the pumpkin this point corresponds to this point and so on this gives me a way to convert from pumpkin space to sphere space one other quick point imagine my pumpkin was really messed up and it had some tumor thing hanging off the side this pumpkin will not work for the method that i just described because if i project a ray out onto the surface of the sphere i don't know if it came from here or here it's ambiguous writing the code for all this is just describing to the computer in excruciating detail everything that i just explained you'd think i'd be better at this by now congratulations we can now wrap a meme around a pumpkin the final boss step is turning this into a series of moves that the machine will obediently perform if everything works out the end result will be my wife's face carved into the pumpkin there are easy and hard ways to generate these series of moves when is halloween yeah we're going with the easy way so remember i want this robot to be able to do two things cut out shapes like old school pumpkins and cut lithophanes the idea behind a lithofan is that you vary the thickness of a translucent material to get different colors you can use this effect to get a lot more detail than you can by cutting out chunks because it has shades of gray 50 wasn't quite enough for me so i programmed it to have 254. welcome to my kitchen i'm going to be teaching you how to make tool paths all you need is a pumpkin the thing you're going to be cutting with and whatever you'd like to cut onto the pumpkin start off by taking your desired image and mapping it onto the pumpkin then find the outlines of all the regions after that offset the edges in by the radius of the tool this will ensure you cut the right shape if you cut all the way to the edge the part will be too big if the tool is too big for the region cut down the middle of it because it's better to have something than nothing then just make moves for the robot to go from one region to another and you're ready to cut out lines to cut a lithophane simply fill each region with horizontal cuts then set the depth of each cut according to the color of the picture and that's all there is to it this is a recipe that the whole family is going to love because you're awesome all right the robot's built the software is done now it's time to have some fun oh no never mind so what happened is i had accidentally connected plus to minus and minus to plus and that fried everything the microcontroller the ics it fried my laptop that really set me back but i have replaced everything all right it doesn't seem like anything happened that's good when it seems like something happened that's when he knows bad okay now we can get into the meat wow everything worked on the first try yeah i wish you've probably heard me talk about integration held before it's when you try to put all the pieces together for a robot like this and nothing works yeah i was in integration health for quite a while and i guess it fits really nicely with the halloween theme so let's start with a quick and easy test do anything fun this weekend oh well cool i should probably turn that off cutting out chunks is no problem and works really well this is a caricature of our daughter she has three teeth and smiles just like this that's cool but i made this to make pumpkins that i can't make with my own hands hey would you carve on your pumpkin a pumpkin i don't know why i like that so much it's not really very funny pretty cool but i didn't cut deep enough so it's harder to see than it should be trying to cut this pumpkin has exposed all of the software bugs i've been trying to cut this for like five hours i'm not gonna leave this basement until this pumpkin is cut you're an idiot i ended up sleeping in the basement so i could monitor it whilst cutting i wish i was kidding all that and it's still super hecked up i don't know what the deal is it should look like this i wish i would have remembered the baby monitor before i slept in the basement if we keep trying we should succeed eventually right this one definitely has that just put me out of my misery aesthetic something is really wrong let's see how the white lithophane does all the software seems good but this is still crap okay i finally found a huge problem this is supposed to be tight i took everything apart put it back together it's now fixed that fix did the trick and i carried a few more pumpkins including a good lithophane of my wife's face she's gonna determine if these pumpkins are any good by rendering a verdict on a scale of one to ten first up portrait of our daughter ten no question okay how about the pumpkin pumpkin it's like a self-portrait a reflection on what it means to be a pumpkin three to four three when's the last time you saw a pumpkin carved into a pumpkin that's true i call this the huge waste of time the robot got loose it didn't run away but it it got floppy seven all right this is my personal favorite i'm pretty messed up you look mad in terms of aesthetic appeal i'd give it a three if you don't think very highly of yourself hopefully that's not really me wait until you overlay the photo looks just like you only when you're glaring at me but that's exactly how it feels to look down those those little pupils this one looks like that meme where they tried to restore that painting the way i might describe this is it's just saying kill me you kinda look like the girl scout logo a two two come on maybe we're seeing different things i'm seeing a profile i'm seeing an old shriveled head sideways saying kill me all right well it does look sadder now the more i'm looking at it well the funny thing is these are all derived from your face well we all know the winner the big takeaway is that just because something's hard it doesn't mean that it's good i really want to see that crazy pattern working so let's try again if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing it helps me out a lot and keeps you in the loop when there's new videos posted if you'd like to support these projects directly and get behind the scenes info check out my patreon and the last way you can help is to check out any sponsors now we're talking i'm really happy with this result although i would like to be a little cleaner my guess is that this is a combination of using really cheap cutters and my machine not being stiff enough i'll fix both next time disregard the robot in the frame i'm going to tell you about today's sponsor audible before you say oh sponsor and get out of here a couple reasons to stick around one i'm going to be trying to carve the promo code in this pumpkin this is actually the first time i've ever tried to use this robot and there's a good chance it's not gonna work so hopefully an interesting result the other reason is audible's awesome i love it and i think you're gonna love it too it's a vast collection of audio books and other spoken word things the great thing about it is i can learn while i'm doing other things it's kind of like getting extra hours in your day because you get to get more out of every hour if i'm writing a business book one of my keys to success would be audible sorry it looked like my robot was about to kill itself i really love learning about how people did something especially something hard there's this book i was reading recently about the effort to make the atomic bomb has the really original title of the making of the atomic bomb it's an absolutely epic book it goes into the science the physicists the politics it's so good there's so many takeaways from your book like this you can learn so much from the past the only problem is it's a really intimidating book it's like a 50 hour book but because i can listen to it when i'm in the shop or just doing whatever things my brain is idle it's great all right here it goes we had a slight technical difficulty i was cutting too deep so it was cutting something though let's try again signing up for audible gets you access to a gigantic library of titles they call it their plus library as well as a credit every month for any book can you see the problem it cut it backwards you should try audible it's amazing you'll get more hours in your day and you can get a free month by going to audible.com stuff made here or texting starting off after enough athletes three he didn't passing it i'm just kidding you can text stuff made here to 500 500. let's go get this cleaned up and see how it looks definitely some stuff to improve but i'm happy you'll be happy too if you go get audible get your free trial at audible.com stuff made here or listen to the pumpkin and text stuff made here to 500 500.

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 6,457,776

Rating: 4.9440427 out of 5

Keywords: pumpkin carving, halloween pumpkin, jack o lantern, 3d pumpkin carving, carved pumpkin, awesome pumpkin, how to carve pumpkins like a pro, stuff made here, impossible pumpkin, cnc pumpkin, computational geometry

Id: X9zXcnSXNF0

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ycnz]

AKA "Here's a 5-axis CNC pumpkin mill I built in my basement" - dude is quite hardcore.

[u/mx3goose]

I wish I had a sponsor ready to overnight me a 20,000$ plasma torch on quick dial.

[u/shanesdogbax]

When I found my YouTube recommendation this channel. I’m binge watched all videos and I actually like new Shane and his “Wife”. Subscribed!

[u/EternalGandhi]

Damn, his wife's face has some harsh angles. Those cheek bones could cut glass.