Arduino-Powered Wire Bending Machine

Arduino-Powered Wire Bending Machine(blog.makezine.com)

105 points by eskimoblood 14 years ago | 18 comments

malandrew 14 years ago |

How does it know how not to bend the wire so it doesn't interfere with its own operation? And if it doesn't know, are there are set of heuristics used to know when the design you make isn't possible?

libria 14 years ago | |

I was waiting to see exactly how this was handled on the octothorpe, but he strategically cut it short. Also, it seemed a little hand-wavy placing a simple spring among a collection of far more complex 3d objects.

It's an awesome project, but I appreciate when engineers either show how they addressed the edge cases, or are more honest about its failure points.

jonnycowboy 14 years ago | |

The more modern CAM packages will do this for you automatically (routing CNC so that it does not interfere with the part) but this version probably relies on the user to properly define the bends and angles so that no interference occurs.

ChuckMcM 14 years ago |

Here is a youtube video of same: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve1zzDXlJoA

(For some reason Firefox + linux doesn't like Vimeo most of the time)

This is a cool device. And wire bending is used in a lot of things, from making holders to support frames. These things tend to be tuned to a particular wire gauge and minimum radius so some tool and die shops will have either multiple benders or various dies for a configurable bender.

Cool things you can make with these are baskets for catching/holding parts, springs, latch returns, awesome bubble wands, and artistic lettering.

_mattb 14 years ago |

So cool -- out of curiosity, is this emulating the actions of a pre-existing, "professional" machine or is the concept brand new?

neonkiwi 14 years ago | |

There are expensive machines you can buy that do this: CNC wire benders. From the first page of YouTube hits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwygMdpQ8SU

_mattb 14 years ago | | |

Cool, thanks. I just noticed they allude to these machines in their blog post: http://blog.pensanyc.com/tagged/DIWire

adaml_623 14 years ago | |

There are wire and pipe bending machines that do this on a larger (and probably smaller) scale. They are however expensive and I doubt their tool chain is open source

oellegaard 14 years ago |

Awesome!! However, I couldn't help notice that if you have a 3D object, it seems that it keeps spinning the chord around the machine - at one point it would unplug itself - should be an easy fix though.

senthilnayagam 14 years ago |

it will be hours of fun

somebody should create a online shop where we can get these gadgets built and shipped

oellegaard 14 years ago | |

Yeah, that'd be awesome! Or at least make some IKEA-like instructions on how to assemble them - as a programmer I have no idea how to put these things together. I would totally pay for that, like an arduino device, packed IKEA style.

prezjordan 14 years ago |

This is great! Very ingenious design. How would it fare with thin wire?

diminish 14 years ago |

Wow nice prototype, does it make sense to use Arduino production?

neonkiwi 14 years ago | |

If you have code for an Arudino, you can make a board that uses an AVR microcontroller (made by Atmel[0]) with that same code. It may be possible to use a cheaper AVR if you don't need the same functionality (eg, if you aren't using hardware pulse width modulation, there are cheaper chips) with only slight code modifications.

[0] http://www.atmel.com

adestefan 14 years ago | |

Absolutely not as it would be too expensive. It looks like the Arduino is used to drive a couple motors. You could do the same thing with any inexpensive micro-controller. It's a pretty cool, self contained design though.

DanBC 14 years ago |

Is there a 3d LOGO?

gravitronic 14 years ago | |

Not sure if you mean purely software, but generally CNC machines are instructed in a language called G-Code which is basically 3D LOGO (move absolute/relative on a number of axis and some extra instructions to start/stop spindle, etc)

iliis 14 years ago | |

At least xlogo supports 3D (http://xlogo.tuxfamily.org/).