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Our old space at Industrigatan is now closed!
We are temporarily located at Västanforsgatan 21. There are several entrances, some of which may be locked from time to time. The northern entrance should always be open on Tuesdays.
Palestinska Föreningen is located in the same building and may be a good waypoint, but we do not share the same entrace.
The part of the building where we have set up shop belongs to Kontrapunkt, so ask around for that if you are unable to find your way in.
Click for big map
As soon as our new facilities are ready we will move again - so don’t forget to check back before heading our way. The new place is just one street away from this temporary location.
PS. Thanks for the house-warming gift - two cases of Red Bull to keep us going strong! Very nice!
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We had our first meetup in the new space. It seems we haven’t been excessively good at communicating where Forskningsavdelningen is located these days.
Yesterday we were at Kontrapunkt Social Center on Västanforsgatan 21. It’s the door to the left of the van in this picture.
This is where we will be until we move into our new locations.
Our room was littered with stuff since the move but luckily we found a nice work area in a nearby room. It took some time to find our boxes of tools, but once found we started hacking with the help of lots of energy drinks two forskers brougt as a moving in gift.
Some people were working on the house bot project initiated this weekend, there was some problem with the motor shaft couplings that were eventually solved by large amounts of epoxy glue.
We did some improvised hot wire styrofoam cutting in preparation of next weeks Sterling engine project. It was super fun cutting styrofoam with a hot wire.
Equipment used:
- some nichrome wire
- a piece of wood
- 4 screws
- a computer PSU
- a rubber band (optional)
Boomlinde, our in-house musician, provided entertainment in the form of djembe drumming and sweet calimba vibes.
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For the Hackathon event last weekend, we wanted to build a robot and decided to go for a kiwi-drive.
The kiwi-drive is a three wheel drive configurations that use special wheels to achieve omnidirectional movement.
The robot was designed in Corel Draw (that’s what the laser cutter prefers) during the two weeks leading up to Hackathon and parts were purchased so that everything would be ready when the build started. We also moved the design from Corel Draw, via AutoCAD for cleanup, to SketchUp for a virtual test assembly and rendering to make sure everything would fit together.
The design was named KiwiRay, from kiwi-drive and stingray as the original design kind of looked like a stingray from above. Those design elements were later removed, but the motherboard mounting plate was shaped as a stingray instead.
The idea behind the platform was to create a design that uses only standard, easily 
available parts, so that anyone can reproduce it. The exception is the wheels from vexrobotics, but they can be replaced by any wheels of the same type. Other than that it uses an Arduino Uno, NEMA 23 motors, M5, M4 and M3 nuts and bolts and the chassis is cut from any 4mm material - plastic/plexiglass, wood or even metal. It can also easily be redisigned to support a wide variety of ball bearings and motors and has enough space to fit virtually any choice of motors, stepper drivers and even gear boxes if necessary
The Arduino provides a simple serial interface and does all of the required drive calculations. It also provides an add-on interface that can be accessed using the same serial link and allows up to over a hundred expansions to easily be added to the system. The first two addons will be a battery voltage monitor and an emoticon display.
The actual build went smoothly, all parts fit together nicely although some nuts turned out to be quite hard to get attached, prolonging the build time significantly. We didn’t get as far as we’d like, but the entire platform was assembled during the weekend and can now be controlled over a usb-connection that will be hooked up to the on-board computer once that is finished.
See our wiki page for the details.
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