[Photo: Paul Rea]
I must have some 300-CDs and DVDs full of archived music, anime, and movies lying around. I know I should probably move the data over to hard drives before they degrade. But it’s a boring hassle to sit around and put a disc into my PC, take it out, rinse-and-repeat.
Paul Rea came across the same dilemma, but decided to put together an Arduino controlled Lego arm to take care of the robotic task for him.
This little Lego-based robot uses an arm to pick up a disc, swing it over to a CD drive, rip it, and finally place into a discard tray. To build it, Rea used Lego parts for the arm and platform, and a slightly modified CD drive placed inside of a wooden base.
For the mechanical bits Rea purchased a Base Rotate Kit from Lynx Motion, and assembled a wooden manipulator inspired by Matthias Wandel’s CD duplicator to pick up the discs. The whole platform runs off a loop programed into the Arduino, and it can hook up to any computer without needing specific drivers or software.
Rea says that this first build was just a learning process, which he completely documents on his site. For his next build he hopes to make it smaller with a larger CD capacity, incorporate a new vacuum pump so it will use suction to pick up the discs, and make it completely out of 3D printed parts.
How old is your oldest CD or DVD? Let us know in the comments!
[Paul Rea via Hack a Day]
Like this? You might also enjoy…
- Catastrophe Becomes Art With 3D Printing
- Spherical Flying Drone Looks Like Something From Sci-Fi Movies
- Stanford Program Decrypts Captchas, Spam Bots Inbound
Get your GeekTech on: Twitter - Facebook - RSS | Tip us off
Ad Choices