[Noisebridge-discuss] About the missing robotic arm on wheel chair robot

[Jake]

The robot already has a safety mechanism.  You can't get it to move 
without a login and some knowledge of how the scripts work.  The incident 
with the robot crashing into the bikes was when a certain person (who is a 
member of noisebridge) was entrusted with that access and handed the 
controls over to some kids, unsupervised.  These were the same kids who, 
one of which at least, would entertain himself by cutting the wires off of 
things in the hack shelves and crushing cellphones in the vise in the 
shop, or sawing cellular phones in half... who knows what else.

Anyway, if you want to supply a giant red button, i'll wire it in.

-jake

Martin Bogomolni wrote:
As a safety-third advocate, I still concur that a nice large e-stop
button would be a very, very, very good idea on the wheelchair bot.

( ... and I'm someone that likes to build machines that throw 2x4's
into things )

-M

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Gopiballava Flaherty
<gopiballava at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 2012, at 17:07, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:
>
>> Some people thought it was too unweildy
>
> Unwieldy would be one way to describe it. Dangerous would be a more 
accurate way.
>
> The last time I saw the robot in use, it was randomly crashing in to 
bikes and had no functional emergency stop mechanism. It was quite 
challenging to stop it.
>
> The motors are high torque and fast. Without the arm, the robot is 
pretty dangerous. With it, it is potentially lethal.
>
> I would encourage you to consider safety first and figure out how to 
properly control and stop the robot before you make it even more 
dangerous.
> _______________________________________________