Dodger came over yesterday with a Vex Robotics kit and we prototyped a Shaker Robot! It’s the first step in making a a fully-robotic tiki bar. We got the robot shaker to kind of shake up a drink, so we declared it sucessful and went to celebrate at Jasmine Tea House with mang and about 20 other people. Yay! Here are some notes for going forward:

• The current design calls for dressing up the shaker in a hula skirt and a coconut bra. For this to work well, we need to move the pivot point to the center.
• I was thinking about carving a wooden cam for some janky rotation-to-linear translation, but I think using a solenoid might make more sense, because then we can sync the shaker to music!
• We need to write some tiki music that our robot can play while shaking up a drink.
• We could also make a hula dancer robot that holds the shaker in her hands, but I think for now we should continue with the current plan: dressing up the shaker in a coconut bra.
• We got a lot done with our pair-hacking setup. Dodger does all the work, and I take all the credit :)

Filed under: tikibar, tronix · 3 Comments