You've probably never seen a robot move like THIS before.

within the realm of mechanical design I usually find that the best way to understand a concept is to apply it myself but if you're anything like me you'll know that often the compulsion to understand a concept can outweigh the lack of any real practical application for it so when I came across this novel conception of a parallel access crypteron robot my fate was sealed [Music] now I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea so I'll get this out of the way now I'm not an engineer and when it comes to robotics control theory and software development I'm about as qualified as this bag of gravel my goals on this project are firmly rooted in the cool factor of the final object rather than any kind of submicron precision so we'll definitely be turning this bad boy up a notch but if this concept grabs you like it grabbed me don't hesitate to check out the description for links to all my sources as well as the 3D files and code that I hacked together for this project and feel free to roast every aspect of it in the comments below so what even is a tripteron well first of all it's actually a treron and that's just Greek for robot with too many parts second of all it's a motion platform with 3 degrees of freedom that looks way more complicated than it really is you see these linkages or Wings only transmit Motion in One Direction while allowing free movement in the other two Dimensions with three sets arranged perpendicularly the head is fully constrained within our current three-dimensional reality until we decide to move one of those anchor points now it's obviously a bit of a leap from a basic Tryon like this one to the parallel axis variation will be slapping together in this video but it's going to be a lot easier to understand the actual mechanics of why once we've got the thing in front of us just ask me how I know the did I do with that aluminium I decided to make the bulk of the components for my tripteron out of aluminium that's mainly for ease of Machining but it can't hurt to keep everything fairly lightweight and rigidity isn't too much of a concern in this particular application this application being no application but aluminium isn't all that cheap and I'd hate to get everything machined only to find some critical design oversight that renders all of my Machining efforts useless my material scrap and my life ruined so to start off with the easiest way to get it out of the computer and into reality by far would be with a 3D printer unfortunately my 3D printer is a steaming hot pile of garbage okay maybe that's a bit harsh it was only 200 bucks and I have managed to get a couple of functional prints out of it but it's hard to get excited about the process when every print is essentially a coin toss right here we go damn it oh come on SO with this fairly complicated project looming over me I was finally ready to bite the bullet and buy a professional machine when someone Farm more versed in the ways of YouTube infamy offered some Sage advice do not buy one just email someone and get a free one so I did and what do you know it worked dude wait why did I not reach out to these guys a few days later I had a brand new X1 Carbon and AMS unit sitting on my front doorstep once I had the printer set up it wasn't long before I had a full set of components to play around with which turned out to be a really good thing I managed to find more than a couple of issues with the first iteration of the design like this Anchor Point Collision I won't bore you with all the details because this is supposed to be a machining Channel and we still haven't done any Machining but I did a lot of printing before I was happy enough to jump into the Machining or at least jump into the side projects required to jump into the Machining to start off with the charm of hot chips flying unfettered from the milling machine and the thrill of staring right into the eyes of death by flying bt30 collet Chuck has finally just about worn off so I quickly knocked up an enclosure to keep the bulk of the onslaught contained I know the execution here is a bit half-baked but as they say an enclosure on the mill is worth two in the bush and look sliding doors the scaredy cat screen was paying dividends almost immediately as I got cracking on a mount for my brand new shop cyal reducer driven fourth axis TM [Music] yeah this isn't my proudest creation either but what did you expect from a side project plus we're only going to be Machining aluminium and I'd really like to make sure my brand new shop made cyclo reducer driven fourth axis TM is actually worth using before I give it any more of my time of course I'm still working on the name and with that I was ready to jump into the Machining and when I say Machining of course I mean programming because despite your preconceptions about the wonders of CNC Machining nothing can prepare you for the mountain of work required to craft a program that doesn't want to destroy your part your machine or just you personally and things only get worse when you add a fourth axis into the mix I decided to start on the linkages because there's eight of them so if I mess up the first one I can chalk it up to a pre-production run experiment but if it goes right I can blame it on my unlimited skill of course when dealing with new equipment you're always going to have to perform pre-production run experiments and while my findings in this case did indicate a positive outlook they also highlighted the need for a proper flood coolant [Music] system well I say proper flood coolant Sy system but what I really mean is a mish mash of Tupperware vinyl tubing pneumatic push connectors and an old aquarium pump it's the same but different I swear I'll get around to sealing the enclosure and adding some proper drainage eventually so if you like proper drainage you should like the video and if you subscribe I'll know you want to see more with coolant sorted with coolant sorted and the program 80% proven I finally started to feel the benefits of automation that everyone keeps banging on about now there's no denying that the Simplicity of Dan's design is fantastic but as you might have already spotted there are a couple of things I've decided to do a little differently I'll go into a bit more detail on that once we're ready to put everything together but for now the only relevant detail is that I might have accidentally on purpose over complicated things a little bit the weight reduction slots angled faces and compound surface geometries on these parts are almost entirely gratuitous mind you so is almost everything I do around here but they sure do make for an excellent opportunity to take the brand new shop made cycal reducer driven fourth axis for a spin I have to say despite its imperfections the fourth axis is an absolute GameChanger being able to access almost all the features of a part like this one and this one and that one and this one and that one in a single up is getting close to effortless a fifth axis would definitely be better and of course no matter how many spinning migs I manage to compulsively acquire I still have to load the stock and clean up the nubbin but if you're looking for truly effortless Machining the sponsor of today's video PCB way is the obvious choice because as well as custom pcbs for any occasion did you know that PCB way offers an extensive range of CNC Machining services from laser cutting and Sheet Metal bending to three four 5 access Machining capabilities and More in pretty much any material you could need a lot of people commented on my last video wondering why I didn't get PCB way to make the cyal discs for this bad boy and I'm sure I'll get some more in the same Vein on this video so I'll try to do a better job of explaining first of all my vanity but more importantly pcbway services are there to take care of the jobs that you haven't got the time equipment or patience for I mean who really wants to spend days cutting dovetails and slots in 414 40 for this project I definitely could have used the budget they provided on some custom pcbs but I'm fresh out of knowing what the is going on here so instead I thought we could use it to celebrate hitting 100,000 subscribers in true non-er fashion I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the standard issue silver play button it's just a little generic and maybe kind of tacky now this made of grade five Titanium with a surface roughness of 1.6 microns is more like it and it only took 12 days from placing my order to holding this shiny heavier than I expected object of vanity massive thanks to pcbway for saving me the trouble of sourcing titanium and breaking who knows how many MMS so to find out what PCB way can do for you click the link in the description and get a free quote today and of course thanks to you who for some reason or another seem incredibly interested in what goes on in this shop with the flood coolant pumping and the cycloidal drive cycling I managed to run almost all of the linkages without incident [Music] though I never could get the chatter on this radius to completely disappear I guess my stick out game just isn't as strong as I thought it was as always it was the final part where things went all right I'm still not entirely sure how or why but I've got a bunch of theories somewhere between the roughing and finishing operations the Y AIS origin had shifted as though the machine had forgotten where it was it could have been my poor probing routine or too limp a grip on the stock or maybe the entire fourth axis had shifted during the admittedly overzealous roughing but whatever it was i' tried nothing and I was all out of ideas so I ran the part again and got exactly the same result well it was a little better at least this time the Contour was continuous and being that I was out of material and the blemish is nothing more than cosmetic I decided to move on with all the linkages ready for op two it was time to head to the manual Mill to give the unfinished radiuses a tickle oh yeah how rude of me please say hello to the newest member of my growing machine family I actually picked up this Milling head at the same time as I got the lathe with the honest intention to unite the two in holy matrimony after it had been sitting in a crate doing a grand total of bugger all for the last few months I finally accepted that that was never going to happen and if it did the anguish of having to remove and replace the tool poost every time I wanted to use the mil would surely drive me to an early grave so I called in a favor to help me pick up the matching table as I should have done in the first place of course you should always be careful about the favors you call in because you never know how you might be paying them back how you going oh hello can I hug the camera then I could finally Mount the linkages up on the rotary table and finish off the the nubbin the parts with the off-center chamfers also had their through holes and bearing seats a little closer to one side than the other which definitely caused a bit of confusion but I decided to address them with a bit of hand filing later and focus on the parts with reliable datam this little thing has turned out to be way more capable than I expected it to be next up with the cheeks and by then I was definitely feeling a little more confident for starters I'd reached a pretty good recipe of feeds and speeds for this setup so despite the jankiness of it all I wasn't quite so nervous watching it [Music] run also I'm pretty sure this villet stock was a different alloy more suited to Machining than the square bar I'd used to make the linkages and the larger cross-section of the stock meant the stick out wasn't so much of an [Music] issue once I had a program I was happy with all I had to do was jump back into Cam scale my model to a factor of minus one invert all of the tool orientation angles and I had a set of tool paths perfectly suited to creating a mirrored path it's simple stuff really [Music] unfortunately I wasn't able to use the CNC to drill the threaded holes in these parts as they're tilted in two directions but a simple 3D printed fixture made short work of getting them set up in the mini Mill for drilling and tapping and a second allowed me to clean up the Nubs in no time flat [Music] I decided to tackle both of the belt clips at the same time following the same recipe for roughing and finishing as the previous parts [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] this time I also managed to fit in a parting operation at the end so after a quick Deb birth all they needed was a swift bit of splitting and a few threads and then I could transfer their mounting holes over to the cheeks the next piece of the puzzle and the main difference between Dan's treron and my own is what I'm calling the carriage his choice to use dual rails does a great job of reducing the complexity of the overall system but it also means that the capacity for y axis travel is reduced when the other axes are at full extension and vice versa now arguing the biggest advantage of this motion system is that the y axis can actually just be as long as you need it to and if it were the length of a warehouse a little bit of lost travel at either end isn't going to be the end of the world but I decided to build the tripon around this combination vslot Extrusion and linear slide and look I'll be the first to admit that the use of vslot Extrusion is a little bit low brow especially within the Realms of machinist YouTube but in this case being able to Route the belts through the slots and Hollows and easily attach the motors and belt attention is allowed me to look past my disdain for the material the thing is I could only find it in 500 mm lengths so to slip past my slighter size sourcing Soros I designed this part to have the second and third rails separate from the First with the only downside being this Monumental cam program that came along with it [Music] my confidence in the setups so far had been on a steady incline so I figured it was just about time to give it some more beans I upped the feed override to 150% and it was absolutely [Music] ripping right up until it ripped the workpiece from the Chuck yeah I'm not sure what I was thinking either damn it grabbing on to only the very tip of the stock when I could have just flipped the jaws and saved myself a world of hurt see my roughing operations were only leaving a fifth of a MM and with no finished surfaces to indicate off of let alone the patience to dial this part back in I decided to just have another go this time I did flip those jaws around and I also added something of an index to the base of the stock that will hopefully keep the part located and also speed up the process of getting it set up in the first place so after mounting the last piece piece of suitable stock I had left in the workshop and dialing back the feeds and speeds to a proven level the part was slowly but surely [Music] unveiled unfortunately it soon became clear that there were some pretty obvious inconsistencies in the position of tool paths at different angles this was the same issue that i' had encountered earlier on the linkages but this occurrence narrowed things down quite considerably after the first incident I made sure to tighten every Fastener on the machine I could lay my hands on and even added some extras so for the sake of my sanity we're going to assume that our issue is rooted in either my probing routine or the positioning accuracy of the cyal drive now I've got some potential solutions for both of these issues on order but that's going to be a whole other story so for now we're just going to turn this thing up one more Notch run a blend operation with -.2 MM stock to leave and pretend like nothing ever happened [Music] [Music] [Music] once that was done it was back over to the manual Mill to touch up the knb punch some holes and add some threads [Music] [Applause] [Applause] running the smaller rear spacer went by without a hitch then it was on to the final piece of the puzzle which I'm calling the head it took me a while to wrap my head around this part because the only bit of alley I had that were big enough were only just so and being Parts I scavenged from an existing machine they already had some rather inconvenient pre-existing holes I decided I could get around the presence of the holes with some care but the tiny sliver of excess stock I had to play with was definitely not enough for the chuck to hang on to especially if the goal was to avoid sending a roughing endmill through one or all of the Jaws and just to be clear that was definitely the goal so I decided to make a dovetail fixture [Music] well that's not going to work and then I immediately decided to make a slightly larger dovetail fixture [Music] [Music] [Applause] it has the same indexing features at the base that we added to that sock before minus one for uh weight reduction and this slit with the help of a couple of capad screws allow it to clamp down on a part once I've added a matching Dov toil to the stock of [Music] course then it was just the same old story of roughing followed by some semi-finishing and then some finishing with a ball noosed endmill now the stepover on the finishing passes is pretty coarse but I'm sure you can understand that with a Max spindle speed of 3,000 RPM I was trying to avoid waiting around for days to get to the end of the program I'm actually pretty pleased with the final pattern even if it is a bit cuspy I cleaned up the remaining faces with the fly cutter then then used a vice on top of an angle block on top of a one 12 three block on top of a tilting table to drill the holes and add the threads required for the wings to attach now there's a good chance you've already noticed this but remember when I said I'd have to take extra care to orient those pre-existing holes well that didn't go too well but I think I have a solution to cover it [Music] up hilarious gags aren't the only things that have been coming off the bed of the X1 Carbon while I've been busy making chips it's been working its hands-free Magic on a whole bunch of other little bits and Bobs that we're going to need to put the tripter on together including the motor mounts belt tensioner and a whole bunch of spaces just quickly while bamboo lab did send me this machine and a buttload of filament for free this isn't a paid sponsorship so they didn't get to see this video before it was uploaded and I was genuinely planning on buying one of their machines already of course if you're ever putting this much money into anything you should always do your own research but if you do decide on a bamboo lab printer or just need to restock your filament consider using the affiliate Link in the description below to help keep these projects rolling so with the Machining done what the hell God damn it [Music] [Applause] so with the Machining done and all the parts printed it was time for assembly and what better opportunity to explain the features of my design than the first time it was ever put together I definitely wasn't already editing this video before I got around to planning this sequence let alone filming it and crossing my fingers that no one would notice the continuity errors what would make you think as I touched on earlier the whole idea of this Carriage component is to allow the second and third axes to be stacked on top of the first which will allow a more complete range of motion with the limited main slide I'd Chosen and most of the seemingly over complex features like this big old pocket are there to allow me to fill it up with a whole bunch of pulleys and spaces so that the belts can get to where they need to go the rails go on next retaining those shafts and connecting the rear pulley mount to the main Carriage then I'll add the two sliding Wing mounts along with their matching belt clamps hopefully all those pulley are starting to make sense next I'll attach the carriage to the main slide but not before for pointing out this handy slot and pair of grub screws underneath which will let me attach the third belt it's going to be a lot easier to install the belts without the wings and the head in the way so we'll get the motor mounts and belt tensioner on next the two Motors at the front bolt on with a [Music] spacer and the third motor goes in one of the rear positions dealer's Choice here the shell is mirrored and the remaining slot will be occupied by our control Electronics by the way these motors are a bit Overkill but once you've experienced Clos Loop control it's hard to want to deal with anything else and the integrated drivers will make this whole setup nice and compact after adding all the required pulleys and shafts to one half of the shell I can carefully line up the other half then this cover will snap into place and hold everything together I followed a similar process for the forward set of pulley which I'll be able to slide forward and back to tension the [Music] belts threading the belts in was definitely the fliest part of this process really love a word with the bloku design this thing right about now [Music] with that out of the way I could attach all the wings in their requisite thrust bearings but not before prettying up the bolts a little bit [Music] finally I attach the [Music] head and just like that we've got ourselves a tripter on of course it doesn't actually do anything yet so it's was finally time to do anything but the code but eventually I couldn't put it off any longer nice I toed around with a couple of ideas forgetting this thing to move but none of them were without their challenges my first attempt involved starting from scratch but I ran into brick wall after brick wall trying to figure out how to move multiple motors simultaneously and in coordination while also being able to control acceleration which is kind of important if you don't want your robot to shake itself to [Music] Pieces my second approach and the solution I ultimately settled on made use of an Arduino running gble Geral grbl for motion planning and control but while the previously mentioned firmware supports a number of kinematic Arrangements unfortunately the parallel axis tripteron is not among them you see if we want the tripteron to move in a coordinate system that makes intuitive sense think up down left right front to back for any given movement we're going to have to carefully coordinate the position and speed of all three motors think of a core XY machine but we've gone ahead and stacked a z-axis on top so in order to move our head left to right motor 1 and motor 2 need to move in opposite directions to move up and down motor 1 and 2 need to move in the opposite direction to motor 3 and moving all three motors in the same direction will move the head forward and back now I know I sounded confident saying that but what you're not seeing is the hours of mental strain note taking and tutorials it took for it to click and even then only just enough to narrowly avoid this adventure becoming a tragedy instead of the comedy we're all hoping for so now I knew how to modify standard G-Code so it made sense to to the tripteron and I thought about hanging it on the wall as a sort of ridiculous push button dancing display stand for that gorgeous silver play button we got but it was pretty boring manually converting the files and it need to be plugged into a computer running a G-Code cender the whole time which would be more than a little inconvenient but if I could solve the portability issue I figured it' make a pretty handy piece of camera gear the answer was to overcome my irrational fear of Serial communication write a little bit of code for a second uino to all some basic functions like jogging adjusting the feed rate setting predefined positions and moving between those positions with the help of this tidy looking kpad of course it wasn't a completely smooth path to that outcome as with any software integration there were some very interesting quirks [Music] but it works most of the time once I've added some Imperial 42 threads I can Power It Up using an npf battery plate with the help of a boost converter and now I can capture completely unnecessary 3axis b-roll Wherever I Go who am I kidding never more than 100 m from this shed [Music]

Channel: Not An Engineer

Views: 549,519

Keywords: cnc mill, engineering, straightedge, precision, lapping, welding, welding project, machining, CNC Mill, DIY CNC, CNC Router, Engineering, Cut Test, how to build cnc, homemade cnc, grblhal, fabrication, diy, cnc, machine, diy cnc router, cnc milling, cnc milling machine, cycloid, cycloidal, drive, gearbox, gearcutting, cycloidal disk, tripteron, parallel axis, robot, automation

Id: io4S9amExNM

Length: 32min 29sec (1949 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2024