Plan for for the Motorized Creeper

Another thing I have been waiting for that never really materialized is the motorized creeper. It was one of the things shown in the very beginning but it never came to be as an accessory. I have been waiting to do a couple of project with that in mind but I guess at this point it will not happen.

The construction does not seem to be particularly complex and if I have rotary accessory already, I can probably just use the hookup for the creeper.

Can you provide guidance or BOM on how the one in the video was build.
Video:
[youtu.be]

It seems there is a geared stepper, tensioner, rack and pinion track but also some kind of a base for handibot itself.
Does it hang in the air or has rollers ? Does it get lifted when moving ?
The rubber base of regular base would make it hard to slide.
How powerful of a motor is needed.
Do you have specs or BOM for that track in the video.

If you point me in the right direction I would love to try and just build one.

Appreciate your help.

Boris Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Another thing I have been waiting for that never
> really materialized is the motorized creeper. It
> was one of the things shown in the very beginning
> but it never came to be as an accessory. I have
> been waiting to do a couple of project with that
> in mind but I guess at this point it will not
> happen.

Boris,
don't give up quite yet. I get the strong impression that getting 2.0 out simply put this on the back burner and maybe it will move back to a front burner now.
Thing about these shopbot guys is that they are perfectionists and that is both their weakness and their strength.
I think it is safe to say I did some beta testing on this back a ways and I get the feeling they just where never quite happy with it.
>
> The construction does not seem to be particularly
> complex and if I have rotary accessory already, I
> can probably just use the hookup for the
> creeper.
The above is correct. You'd just plug in the same cord but you'll need another profile for the control SW.
>
> Can you provide guidance or BOM on how the one in
> the video was build.
> Video:
> [youtu.be]
[www.youtube.com]
[www.youtube.com]
>
> It seems there is a geared stepper, tensioner,
> rack and pinion track but also some kind of a base
> for handibot itself.
again all good guesses. I bet if you pressed you could get the Vcarve files but you'd need a full size shopbot to cut it
> Does it hang in the air or has rollers ? Does it
> get lifted when moving ?
just drags, that is one of the problems. I minimized it using melimene(sp?). I wonder what would have the least drag? The sled its self is HDPE.
> The rubber base of regular base would make it hard
> to slide.
no, the rubber never touches, see the videos I posted above
> How powerful of a motor is needed.
> Do you have specs or BOM for that track in the
> video.
>
> If you point me in the right direction I would
> love to try and just build one.
>
> Appreciate your help.

@Mark thank you for response and video links. I see that there is an updated design. I agree and understand what you are saying.


I would love to know mostly which stepper would work here and what kind of hardware it is for rack and pinion. I have some pretty heavy duty linear rails and aluminum extrusions with v wheels that could probably be adapted for this even if this is not an exact design. I also have an older version of HDPE base for handibot which I might be able to adap or make some sort of jig by hand.

I understand and appreciate the degree of dedication and professionalism of ShopBot guys and have no doubt that the final products when they are finally released are stellar performers. What is difficult for me is dealing with uncertain and very long timelines. I am hoping, that if I can get some guidance, at least maybe I can avoid some rookie mistakes and couple of iterations. I do not mind hacking together something that works.

From my observation this is sort of what impeded some of the potential success for handibot platform. There was and is so much promise but for open source tool that it supposed to be open. Some of the coolest things have been expected for a long time. In the mean time Handibot team is really small compared to ShopBot and list of stuff to be done is very long. I think if there was more open communication and sharing of information this would engage the community better and allow some of these iterations and improvement cycles to be offloaded to be tested by enthusiasts who want to build on the idea.

Instead we see something cool. We salivate, we wait for 2 years. And it is still not there, still being perfected. If we had the plans or and basic idea how to put it together with few pointers then we could build some of these things ourselves and provide useful feedback in the process.

I know from experience that someone who is a master and a perfectionist in his craft can execute excellent and robust solution, but by its nature its sort of creates tunnel vision and prevents out of the box thinking. When these types of things released into the wild and hackers try to make them work incredible advancements and improvements can happen very fast, because while not pros and perfectionists, enthusiasts put their heart and soul in solving real problems they have. And they are not doing it in 9 to 5 situation, they get excited and create.

There are tons of examples of this in the world. Raspberry pi and Rep Rap communities, Open Builds, etc. I myself a Software Architect who started as a Visual artist, to Designer, to Web Developer, to back end developer and now doing some hardware design as well. I have played a role in mini disruptions withinin companies where I would join a team of java architects and engineers, who were stellar. But things would take forever traveling between organizational hierarchies . Being one man band affords me agility where I can create products and solve problems in ways that enterprise engineers would never consider and could not execute on. However it ships a product and then it can get improved much faster than if we wait to ship until its perfect.

Problem with trying to make it perfect is that it takes long time, and tons of people who want this would be perfectly content with about 80% of the perfection that a pro ShopGuy would want. That 20% is whats taking 80% of the time.

I would love to get idea and advise on how I could get there 80%.

If we look at Handibot as a product and its accessories are products that need to be perfected and only then shipped it is a whole different perspective then thinking of it as a platform. Platforms are much more powerful, they are like a way of thinking, bunch of building blocks that can be built upon by adopters. When I was really excited about handibot I thought about it as a platform. A tool is the core, and the way to build accessories and extend it that made an ocean of possibilities a reality. Now it seems different. The platform part did not really materialize.

Am I crazy in thinking this ?

No, I don't think you are crazy at all. While I try to not get to emotional about any of it, I agree 100%.

Every company has to chose what open means to them the the biggest successes I can think of have been very open. You mentioned several but Arduino and Lulzbot also come to mind.

Let's just hope that sometime soon they decide on a open-source model and you can get your creeper and I want to build a variant of the Handi.

Hello Boris and others,

Well ... it is probably me who let you down on the crawler. I have puttered with a number of versions and while I think the concept is cool and plan to keep working at it, the one in the video just had too many issues. Here's a little more reflection on that process ...

General

Fundamentally, the crawler was about creating different ways to work larger areas with a Handibot. A related aspect of this large-area challenge extends the requirements to: 1) being able to do it with a manual version (presumably inexpensive); and 2) to have a more automated version (more expensive, but the kind of thing we were going for with the crawler). The limiting condition for large-area solutions is one where you have added so much additional mechanism, size, and cost that it would be better to just opt for a larger CNC tool.

I personally think there are probably dozens of good, interesting solutions for doing larger areas with Handibots in practical ways. In fact, no sooner had we started shipping our large-area-jig accessory, than a number of Handibotters reported significant improvements on it (Mark Evans, above, has some great variations). Others (such as Eric Schimelpfenig) have reported creative automated solutions using jigging and Handibot-produced material-re-positioning (and see video at bottom of this blog). There is some really creative exploration going on. It helps considerably in our thinking about which directions to go in working on accessories. More importantly, it helps others understand Handibot as an open platform that is readily built on by us and by others, and which does not depend solely on "official" accessories. Handibot represents a new and different form-factor in power tools and has enabling new capabilities that have not been defined. It has been our goal from the start to have a tool that allows exploring such capabilities.

More Specifically

I have come to see the large-area challenge as best dealt with as two challenges (I may be wrong, but I think this makes it more manageable). The first is the challenge of handling long sticks of material such as say, a long 2 X 10 for making stair stringers, or a long 1 x 4 into which we want to 3d carve continuous molding. The second challenge is working over a large piece of sheet material such as plywood, to cut out say, some flat-pack furniture.

I have come to believe the solution to the first challenge will be a fixture or jig under which the material is precisely moved, either manually or automatically while the Handibot remains fixed. The crawler moved the Handibot on the material. As we were practicing it, the crawler did do a reasonable job of the stair-stringer type work, but required a long and awkward fence that included gear rack for motion. And, consistently moving the Handibot, even with a powerful stepper motor, was always a little bit iffy. In the case of trying to do 3d carving, the Handibot, which was physically riding on and holding down the material, kept riding-up over sawdust so that the height of the carving was not consistent from tile to tile. We’ve thought that the improved dust collection of the V2 might address this issue – but the overall awkwardness of the long piece of gear-rack on a fence would still be an issue. I thus think moving the material will work better and provide consistent machining height. There are several blog and forum reports on moving lengths of material under a fixed Handibot, both manual and automated that I think offer good suggestions on how to accomplish it. We hope, of course, to come up with some helper accessories to make it easy for everyone to implement.

Regarding the second challenge, cutting parts out of large sheets, I believe this might be well handled by a Handibot mounted upside down in a table. Sheets within a limited maximum size, say 2’ X 4’, could be manually registered over this table for cutting, or they could be positioned automatically for cutting. We found that when we were using the crawler to move a Handibot on the sheet goods, while the principle worked, again we found sawdust getting under the crawler skids required so much fussing that it was almost easier to just use the jigging system. And because it was necessary to manually move the Handibot between positions within the crawler skid for each new row of work, the overall process was not very automatic. I did manage to make parts for a couple of the Handibot Crates this way with the crawler … but it was not much fun. We have also explored a type of gantry structure for the Handibot with moving table underneath … but we quickly found that we had just build a larger CNC tool.

Other Approaches

One of the questions raised in your post above was about whether we had used wheels or bearings on the Handibot and if we were lifting up the crawler for moves. The answer is no. We just kept things simple. However, I think what you are suggesting is a direction worth exploring in terms of giving Handibots some sort of motion and self-positioning capabilities (even a manual, raise-and-roll system might be interesting). We have experimented with a Handibot drone (you’ve probably seen the video), but it had no ability to precisely position itself in the way required to do serious tiling work.

Handibots’ control and electronic system allow adding lots of additional capabilities for exploring various approaches to doing larger areas and other types of work. I’m appreciating from your comments that we can do a better job of documenting and providing resources for others who want to do this type of exploration. My “take” is that it may not be necessary or appropriate to invest a large effort in describing the specifics of an experiment like the crawler which did not work well enough. Rather, that it would be useful to Handibotters if we could provide more general info about things like hooking up extra stepper motors and explaining how to control them and integrate their actions for doing Handibot tasks. We probably do take it too much for granted, since it is easy for us in the environment here at ShopBot to putter with this sort of thing (and Handibots are designed for it). Yet the materials and resources are not always readily at hand for others. We are probably guilty of presuming it is all more obvious than it actually is.

So, I’m thinking that in addition to continuing our development of accessories, we’ll make a point of delivering more general info about how others can do the same sort of puttering. At the same time, we’ll see if we can put together some experimenter’s kits with things like motors, gearing, and other effectors that hook up easily to Handibots and allow others to push the tool’s capabilities. Handibot is really a quite hackable smart power tool and we look forward to everyone’s participation I moving it forward …

Ted Hall, Handibot / ShopBot Tools