Gold-finger

One finger typing robot

This project is the last one of school-year 2001/2002

It started on the 5th of may with a brain-storming where several ideas were expressed among those: a rocket, a wall-climber, a robot that constructs another robot, a catapult, an educator-detector-robot. The group opted for a type-writer robot.

Now the rules were fixed:

The project was divided into 3 parts:

  1. a two-axes cartesian base
  2. an air-pump driven finger
  3. a program

Here a bad quality photo of the group:

Charles, Luc, Claude and Juri

The project was finalized (unfortunately without internet-feature) on the 4th of July.


The LEGO rotation-sensors being engaged in a robot from another group, we had to improvise. This led to the poor man's rotation sensor.

It was a bit tricky to calibrate the couple of sensors, especially when we discovered that the two light sensors engaged do not return the same values under the same conditions. 

Luc was the specialist for the air-switch and the mechanical part of the rotation-sensor:

Claude designed the air-pump:

Charles worked out the finger-mechanism and the x-axe:

Juri realized the frame, the y-axe, the programs and the icons:

Click on these two pictures to see the videos (500kB and 1.1MB)

The sensor thresholds had to be parametrised. A second rotation-sensor had to be defined for the blue and user4 events. As 4 motors are engaged, we had to use 2 RCXs. RCX-1 sends message 7 to tell its collegue to activate the air-pump.


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