The Roball Sculpture

The sculpture consists of five sub-tracks which gives approximately 15 meters of rail made of 3mm brass rod, a total of 106 3D-Printed pieces is in the sculpture. Estimated time for the design in Google SketchUp was approximately 150 hours.

The construction has taken place during the two years when I had time to spare. Everything is manual bent, welded and adjusted in to the smallest detail.

Estimated construction time in total was approximately 250 hours.

Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8BOKpcJi2Y

This is an Interactive sculpture, you push the button and the robot arm picks up the ball and put it on a randomly selected track and returns to "home" then when the ball has come to the end of the track you can push the button again and so on... It’s all controlled via a Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller (https://www.pololu.com/product/1352)

To be able to get the randomness for the track selection (there is no random functionality in the Mini Maestro programming language) I had to use the analog sensors that “sees” the ball on the track ends at the pickup position. Because of the balls surface, the sensor will give different values depending on how the ball is positioned. This value is then used to calculate on what track to put the ball next.

The robot is heavily influenced of the EEZYbotArm (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1015238).

You can find the program I use in the program zip file.

This sculpture was actually done already in 2016. I just forgot to publish it.
If you have any questions, just let me know. I'll do my best to answer. :)

Enjoy.