The Amp Hour · 6 Feb 2023 · 1h 11m · Episode 618
Chris Gammell, a maker from Jersey City, discusses his work in soft robotics and portable refrigeration. He details the design of 'Programmable Air,' an open-source kit for controlling pneumatic soft robots using an Arduino Nano and specific valves, and explains the challenges of sourcing reliable components. Gammell also describes 'Refigidiro,' a backpack-style vapor compression refrigerator he built to cool liquor, explaining the thermodynamics of the refrigeration cycle and its potential applications in vaccine storage and energy efficiency.
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Kari Love, co-author of 'Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots' and adjunct professor at NYU, discusses the state of soft robotics, comparing drive systems like FlowIO and Programmable Air. She explores the definition of softness, materials like PolySense conductive dye, and simulation challenges, before pivoting to her course on religious robots, covering topics from holy water dispensers to Mormon transhumanism.
The hosts discuss Roboa, an expandable pneumatic snake robot developed by the Autonomous Laboratory at ETH Zurich for search and rescue and industrial inspection. They detail its soft, fabric-based design that expands up to 100 meters using compressed air, allowing it to navigate tight rubble spaces without sparking, making it safe for natural gas pipelines. The team is now commercializing the technology, which can deliver supplies to trapped victims and perform non-destructive inspections.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos review a wide range of hardware hacks, including a complex knife-throwing machine by Quint, a DIY live-streaming backpack by Melissa, and a modular cyberdeck by Faceless Loser. They also discuss Tony Brobston’s ESP8266 smart vents, the Deep Deck macro pad, and Ivan Farah Fantov’s Z80 single-board computer. The episode concludes with a look at the CubeSats hitching a ride on NASA’s Artemis I mission and a discussion on the thermodynamics of beer fermentation.
Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi discuss BreezyBox, a project by Valentine Donald Chuck that provides a busybox-like shell and virtual terminal for the ESP32, enabling interactive development and self-compiling applications on the microcontroller. They also review a case study on Brighter, a Kickstarter-funded lamp company, detailing the manufacturing challenges faced by founder Simon, including heat sink design errors and assembly communication failures. The episode covers Tucker Osman's reverse engineering of iPad displays to create a PC touchscreen, the homebrew scene for the Nintendo Pokemon Mini, and the creation of a custom RGB 14-segment display by East Makes. Finally, they analyze industrial robot safety protocols and test the viability of decade-old PLA filament.
The host reviews several maker projects and crowdfunding campaigns, including a pneumatic soft robot tentacle controlled by an Arduino Nano BLE Sense and a DIY Stream Deck alternative called the Infinite Deck using an ESP32 and Ducky Script. He highlights Bela's Gliss, a pressure-sensitive Eurorack module based on an STM32, and the EsPiFF board, which combines an ESP32 and RP2040 in a Raspberry Pi form factor. The episode concludes with a look at the OKdo x Raxda ROCK 5 Model B, a powerful single-board computer featuring a Rockchip 3588 SoC.
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