Dus… Je hebt deze mooie sectie van de wiki gevonden, welkom. Dit is verzamel plek voor al Inne zijn ge(pre)publiceerde stukken tot hij een eigen blog heeft. Kijk gerust rond en lees de posts etc. het was ook een beetje de bedoeling dat willekeurige “peers” af en toe deze pagina vinden. Het wordt namelijk ook gebruikt voor proofreaden.

Doel: Stukje schrijven voor Adafruit's CircuitPython newsletter n.a.v. de show and tell van 03-03-2021. Publicatie plek: HackadayIO
status: proofreaden (prepublicatie)
datum: 19-04-2021

Soft robotics is a field that has fascinated me for the longest time. Though the research field is maturing I haven't seen many hobby level soft robotic projects. A little more than a year ago I got to use them in an “art” installation for a local festival. Recently I revisited this project, due to the raspberry pi Pico. Running Circuit Python the Desktop Bubble will have the (goal/purpose) of showing what soft robotics could look like. This blog post will be/is a recap of getting (how I got) started with the soft robotics bubbles as well as a glimpse of what's to come for the future.

In the summer of 2019 I found myself with a bit of time on my hands - what a good oppurtunity to do some experiments with soft robotics. The first step is ordering a lot of silicone. It isn't cheap, however 1kg of type shore 8A (very flexible) will go a long way and it is super multi purpose. luckily the Other things you'll need are DC-airpumps, solenoid valves, some kind of h-bridge and a micro-controller though all these are not expensive. (omschrijven naar eerste persoon)

Next As with with anythings that's unfamiliar its wise to start designing something simple. A soft robotic bubble is a great project. It let's you get the hang of both motor control and pouring silicone. The less complexity the less that can go wrong. And you can still tell your peers you are working on a one degrees of freedom soft robotic actuator.

Around the time I was working on this, our community Makerspace got visited by the neighborhood committee. They were looking to spice up the local winter festival with some technology. The prototype bubble turned into an “art” installation of 17 independent bubbles that could change color via Neopixels. Scaling the prototype and making a fitting enclosure for it took a lot of effort. But with tons of help from my awesome fellow Makerspace participants we managed to finish the installation just in time.

The winter festival is a weekend long event with, by and for our neighborhood. It's free and anyone is welcome to visit. The soft robotic bubbles garnered a lot of attention especially with the many kids on the festival. The bubbles themselves proved to be very robust which made the installation weirdly interactive. It is nice to have something to show for your work and I really enjoyed my time at the festival.

The festival bubbles have some unresolved challenges. Due to time constraints the neopixels under the bubbles were just displaying the best parts of the Adafruit strand test code, luckily rainbow swipe is beautiful. It also wasn't possible to control the airpumps and the neopixel animation at the same time. It made the whole thing (installation) look very rigid. The bubbles were also lacking a pressure sensor. This proved not to be a mandatory part since testing showed that the airpumps couldn't burst the bubbles. However pressure sensing will be nice to have when program the behavior of robots.

When I heard heard the announcement of the raspberry pi pico on “Ask an engineer”, it seemed that the PIO functionality would be perfect to control both neopixels and airflow while still being able make decisions on the main loop. Seemingly perfect for soft robotics control. Thus the decision was made to reincarnate the festival bubbles into a desktop bubble, a portable soft bubble for code testing, prototyping and showing of soft robotics.

Assembling the first version went pretty well. The prototype electronics of the festival bubble could be reused and there were still spare bubbles. Running Circuit Python on the pico was also really straightforward. The only challenging bit so far was running the pump via PIO. But a little treasure hunt from starting at the Neopixel Pio Learn guide → getting started with Pico book → Pico documentation → code examples of the PIO library did the trick. Since then there have been learn guides published about how to specifically do PIO on Circuit Python so it should be more straightforward to get into at the time writhing. All said it was still pretty fun.

The next milestone will be adding the pressure sensor and making it battery powered. It would be nice to turn the Desktop Bubble into a learn guide and the electronics into a feather wing. Hopefully, making it easier to start out, I really want to see more hobbyist soft robotics projects.If you see something cool let me know!

Hopefully this will make things easier and more people willing to give soft robotics a try. It would be nice to see more hobby level projects using these techniques. If you see something cool let me know!

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