We are working on the electronics for a hands-on museum exhibit that tests reaction time and shows how you can improve their reaction time through practice. The main components of the control unit are a BeagleBone Black, an 8-Channel Relay Board (to control a set of race track staging…

Recently, we started work on a museum exhibit project that requires reading six sensors, controlling eight relays, and displaying text and graphics to a display monitor. Normally, we like using Arduino, but because of the display requirements of this project, we decided to venture into a small Linux-based single board…

At Beatty Robotics, we’ve made good use of our gantry-style CNC mill over the last few years. We’ve built all our robots to date with it. Recently we decided to augment our machining capability with a vertical CNC mill. Our current mill has been excellent for machining large flat…

At Beatty Robotics, we love building custom computers. Our latest computer project is a “Mini CAD System” for doing Computer Aided Design. Our goal was to build a small, but very powerful computer for running Solidworks and our CAM software HSMWorks. The computer required a super-fast CPU, a discrete…

After watching a glass worker in the River Arts District in Asheville, I decided to try my hand. We already had a torch for heat shrinking wires, and the safety gear, so she bought some glass stock and other supplies and went to work on it. Here’s a picture…

Today, we worked on the wireless telegraph project. We decided to mount the electronics on brass and copper plates, so we designed the parts on the CAD system and then machined the parts on our home made CNC mill (one of our many projects over the last year). Using…

Here at Beatty Robotics, we have a keen interest in mixing cool, old technology with exciting new technology. Recently, we became interested in Morse Code and telegraph equipment. We began exchanging written secret messages in Morse Code. And then we continued on by learning to tap the codes with…

Up to this time, we’ve been using hand tools to build our robots. But over the last few months, we’ve been working on building a Computer Numerical Control Machine (CNC) that will allow us to precisely cut, drill, and machine aluminum, brass, plastic, wood, and other materials.

Part of this…

I made this steampunk necklace. The gears, cogs, machine screw, nut, and chain are made out of copper, bronze, steel, and brass. The main round part with little hobnails on it is bronze plated pewter. The little gears and cogs in the middle actually turn, which I think is…

When we were ordering some parts for our Mechatron robot and we discovered a cool strip of LED lights that worked based on “RGB,” which stands for Red-Green-Blue. These are special LED lights that you can program to whatever color you want by combining red, green, and blue together. I…

We built this cool Stirling Engine from a Japanese kit. The instructions were in Japanese so we had to use the pictures and what made sense. It was so much fun!

We decided to take a day out from the robots and build a super-cool “Ice Tube Clock Kit” from Adafruit. The kit came as several hundred little capacitors, transistors, microchips, and other components, which Genevieve soldered one by one into a little circuit board. I was “chief supervisor” (which means…