Thursday 15 June 2017

Do Not Mess With Fish 237,

and you thought fish were fun!


well not if you give a goldfish a hammer! imagine being a goldfish, you sit in your bowl all day watching the cats and dogs and birds of the household get all the love and attention from their humans and so you get envious, that's why goldfish are best left alone in their bowl, and if they ask for a gun, a rope or a powered exoskeleton you should reply ‘no’ but mad scientist Neil Mendoza is really bad at saying no to his goldfish, so he gave the finny little guy exactly what he's been asking for since Christmas '14- a hammer of his very own, 

Neil's Fish Hammer Actuation Device uses a camera to track the goldfish's movements and drops the hammer when Smashie rotates in place:

As Smashie swims around the aquarium, his position is tracked with a webcam, using software written in C++ using openFrameworks and OpenCV. The hammer follows him around the tank on a carriage powered by an Applied Motion [applied-motion.com] stepper motor. The software calculates the velocity that the motor needs to be moving using a PID algorithm that takes the motor's encoder position as input and gives a velocity as output. This velocity is then sent over UDP to the stepper motor. The hammer head drops based on the slow rotation of a cam that the hammer rests on.

The Fish Hammer was designed using Autodesk Fusion 360 and Autodesk Inventor, so if you want to give your goldfish a special present for his or her birthday or Christmas, instructions on how to build your very own Fish Hammer actuation device are at instructables.com/id/Fish-Hammer-Actuation-Device, this project was created as part of Autodesk's artist in residence program, imagine, give a goldfish a hammer, they will be wanting bicycles next!


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