The Project
Greetings of peace,During my last year in college, we had a subject called project design, I am a computer engineering graduate so we had that, we where told to design a project that is either a stand alone or interfaced one through computers, so me and my team thought of something that would be a nice thing to work on. So at first we where thinking to go for a stand alone one, since I had a trouble dealing with interfacing project during that time, and I am kinda confident with stand alone projects, for the simple reason that we succeeded in making one during our logic circuit 2 project, and at that time interfacing parallel port was just being introduced to us, and that makes me a little bit doubtful in proceeding with interfacing. So the 1st sem ended and all the praises and thanks be to God, I did managed to learn interfacing through parallel port and it was completely super easy. But before that I run through many googling in search for any help, there was the use of the dll ( Direct Link Library) on many languages such as delphi, visual basic and etc. and that's too complicated, too much. You need to import the dll and you need to know the parameters where to pass your variables and stuffs like that. After scrumbling to that kind of method I was still frustrated at that time, but then after that the game changed, a programming language came to my remembrance, which a friend of mine in Canada shared to me, it was Turing a programming language. So I made a research if it's possible to do interfacing programming in Turing, and it was good, Turing can! They have that extra feature, you just need to install the package support included in the installer. And that made me confident with programming parallel ports, and I was able to make 2 project using Turing as a programming language for interfacing parallel ports.
Going back to our project design, me and my team dreamt of something like an automation process, so we ended up with the automated robot arm seeder, there's this seed container with a lot of seeds in it then the robot arm grabs the seeds then transfer it to the seed bedding. And we need to include a conveyor for transport purposes, and a sensor system, which would detect the seed bedding if it's present then that would signal the arm to grab some seeds, then after that the conveyor will transport it out and bring some new empty seed beddings.
Although it was kinda realistic, but still the fear in us, that we might not be able to implement is there. We made a lot of brainstorming, and I was so busy at home doing things to make it possible, prepairing the circuits and fabricating the robot arm, conveyor and the sensor system. Until one day, that dream was already a reality, we where able to make one, a robot arm with a sensor system, and a conveyor that runs and all of this are automated through the computer and the Turing language. Below are some video spoilers of our project.
Video 1 (Robot Arm only)
Video 2 (Robot Arm only )
Video 3 (Robot Arm with Sensor and Conveyor)
Video 4 (Robot Arm with Sensor and Conveyor)
The Materials
First thing to put into mind with regards to the materials is the weight, you need to have a light weight material if you have a small motor to use, but then if you want to use a little bit more heavier you need to make it proportion with the power that your motor can carry. Here are the things that you might want to choose from;A. Cardboard - A light weight material, but not durable enough for a long term use, probably you can use cardboard for prototyping puproses. Candle glue is durable enough to hold things on its place for joints. A tip when using candle glue, using a soldering iron to spread the candle glue evenly on the surface to paste or to join parts will make it durable.
B. Wood - Heavier than cardboard, and durable enough for long term use, but prone to termites attack. You might need a much more powerful motor for rotation. Screws can be used to make joints and candle glue for reinforcement.
C. Alloy Metal - Heavy and durable for long term use, but you need a lot of motor power. Fabricating a robot arm using metals will make it hard to achieve the desired design, since metals are hard to be shaped according to your desired design. Screws are needed to join parts.
The Circuit
I was not able to use a servo motors, since servos aren't available in our area, so it was a challenge for me to create a robot arm using the traditional motors available in our area. I know that the only mechanism for a robot arm to function is for it to rotate clockwise or counter clockwise, up or down, scoop or release, etc., and this can only be achieved by rotating the motor the way it should, and rotating the motor clockwise or counter clockwise is just a matter of reversing the polarity of its voltage source. So I decided to use relays to achieve the mechanism of my robot arm, I ended up with 8 pieces of 6 volts relays (+-1V which means 5 volts will make the relay work). But you can't actually hook that up to parallel ports rigth away, the parallel ports output voltage is just 3-4 volts, and sometimes 5 volts, you need to have a steady 5 volts to make the relay trigger, in order to have a steady 5V source for the relay you need to provide an external supply of 5V for it, but the problem is how will you be able to trigger the relays?Triggering the relay can be achieved using the transistors, in my project I used the 2N 4400 transistor, an NPN transistor, this is the only effective transistor I have been able to use, so I am quite confident with this transistor. With this transistors you can hook up now your parallel port outputs for triggering the relays and making the robot arm move. I haven't used any logic gates anymore since the logic is done by the computer already.
The Turing Programming Language
The programing language that I used was Turing Language, for ease of explanation I will just redirect you to the user manual, I think the user manual is the best fit to explain to you the syntax.Here's the link: User Manual.
Just look for the Parallelput and Parallelget function on the left side of the window, if incase you need some help feel free to ask, just leave a comment below.
Before you can use the Paralllelput and Parallelget functions you need to install the plugin, you need not to worry where to get it, it is already included in the download of the turing program, it's just that you need to manually install it for yourself, you can find it in the support folder and the file name is "dlportio_install", it's an executable file. After installing you need to restart your pc, although there is an issue that some operating systems might not allow you to interact with your parallel ports after installing the "dlportio_install", I was able to successfully communicate with my parallel port using the Windows NT operating system, but I think Windows XP will work fine too, I just do not know if it will work in Windows 7. Please feel free to share if it works on your operating systems.
You can download Turing Programming Language here: Turing Program.
Feel free to ask for help, just leave a comment, I might share the blueprint of the electronic circuit of the project.
