LEGO-firing turret targets tender tootsies

Stepping on LEGO bricks is a meme for a motive: it actually @#$%&! hurts. LEGO brick design is ingenious, however the engineers didn’t contemplate the ramifications of their minimalist building system. We’ve seen individuals do loopy issues for Web factors, similar to stroll throughout a mattress of LEGO like they’re sizzling coals — or in Adam Beedle’s case, construct a LEGO-firing turret particularly to shoot plastic bricks beneath an individual’s ft.

This undertaking consists of two distinct sub-systems: the mechanical turret that launches the LEGO bricks and the focusing on system that acknowledges ft. For the previous, Beedle devised a intelligent rubber band-based mechanism that cranks into place with a rack and pinion. An Arduino Uno rotates the pinion with a continuous-rotation servo motor. The pinion gear has just a few tooth lacking, so it releases the rubber bands and flings the loaded LEGO brick after just a few rotations. One other brick then drops down from a hopper and the cycle repeats, leading to automated firing.

Beedle 3D-printed all the turret’s components and used a second turret motor to offer rotation. The turret additionally has a webcam mount, which is how the focusing on system finds ft. Beedle doesn’t present a lot element on this technique, however we assume that he used one thing like OpenCV operating on a PC to detect ft. The PC would then ship a command to the Arduino by the serial port telling it to rotate the turret within the correct path till the detected foot is centered within the video feed. When it will get shut, it begins spinning the pinion to shoot LEGO bricks.

From what we will see within the video, it appears that evidently the turret labored as meant. That’s to say that Beedle efficiently constructed one thing that will pressure him to step on painful LEGO bricks.