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Homemade Robotic Arms for CD Duplication?
LA Kings Fan writes "I have this current gig of a job which requires me to make numerous copies of CDRs (in the thousands). Since it would be ludicrous to sit in front of my computer to remove a burned CD and put a fresh one in everytime, I've looked around for better, more sensible solutions. There are two alternatives: CD Duplication Towers and Automated Duplicators. They both have their advantages but are very costly. The cool thing about the automated duplicators is that the burning process is automated by the use of a robotic arm which replaces the burned CD with a fresh one. This is neat, so I was wondering if anyone has attempted to take this concept a step further by essentially building their own robotic arm for their burner on their personal computer. Is this feasible? Can a robotic arm like this be created from off the shelf parts? I'm clueless when it comes to this engineering stuff, so any help would be appreciated."
If you have to make so many copies, perhaps you should look into having them professionally reproduced. Are they all identical or is the data frequently updated?
From previous slashdot, why not use lego! Somebody's done it for a DAT tape and a CD changer for parties , the link from slashdot article is now broke, but it was way cool.
Someone built an Amazing Lego DAT Tape Changer out of Mindstorms. I imagine the same could be done for a CDR changer. Here's your excuse to go buy yourself a cool toy!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Lego Mindstorms
how to expect to build it. i don't want to come off mean though. just wanted to bring up that point.
hire a college intern, tell them they will be working with multimedia on a daily basis and have them burn CDs all day. it might be cheaper than a robot and the intern is more mobile.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
there are changers ('hifi' jukeboxes) from sony etc. for a few hundred bucks. one day it occured to me that a modded 400-way changer would kick ass. 400 asses.
say one could marry the cd changing mechanics with an off-the-shelf cd writer. serious hack indeed, but perhaps doable. has anyone disassembled such a changer already?
this would rock.
--dzsino
--dzsino
He has a job that requires him to manually copy "thousands of CDs"? Get real. Any company that is putting out that much product can afford a $500 copying machine instead of paying, at minimum, $5.50/hr to some clueless punk.
I recall a slashdot article about Lego Mindstorms that mentioned something like this... maybe check google?
Don't over complicate a simple problem. I master CDs for a living. There are a ton of CD duplication houses out there. It is not that expensive. I've done a thousand with cases, screenprinting and distribution for about $1,500 and a week turnaround. Do your clients a favor and do it right and fast.
By the time you finish planing and building you robotic arm the whole project could be done. If this is a "gig" as you say your getting paid to do a service. Do the job you were hired to do. Don't go on a tangent just to impress us here.
I find doing a good job well and fast much more impressive than flashy unnecessary extras.
-- No Comment
I've been thinking of something like this for a few years now : a Lego disc changer. Of course I never got around to buying the 300$ lego mindstorms kit. These days I've started tinkering with PICs so perhaps I'll manage to create such a thing, using stepping motors and cleverly positioned IR diodes and captors.
:)
Building the mechanism is relatively simple. The hard part is writing software that will 'talk' to your CD burning software to figure out when to swap discs.
Alternately you could hire a minimum wage student to do it for you
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Build it out of Lego.
But if you did not think about that, then you probably do not have the technical expertise to design, build, & program a robotic arm.
Just go buy a duplicator or pay a stupid kid $5.50/hr + Caffiene + a few cdr's
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
I've been thinking about this for awhile. It started in earnest with the Mindstorms DLT drive, but I've always been an analog hardware sort of guy. I like the Tinkertoy tic-tac-toe player.
My idea was two mechanisms: an injector or loader, and an ejector or unloader. They'd be driven by the cd tray popping out.
The ejector would probably just be some sort of lever arrangement to dump discs into a chute to stack in a box. The ejector would finish and trigger the injector.
The injector would be an escapement of similar design to the one on an old record player where you'd stack the discs on a spindle, and it would drop one at a time.
Consulting with a fellow maker of silly things, he reminded me that I could never inflict such a solution on my employer, having lived with other people's painful hacks far too often.
Now maybe I'll get back to it, now that you mention it. It's more fun to make stuff than build servers or study perl & regexps, or work late.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
The implications of this robotic thingy (if someone finds a way to build it well) are bigger than just replacing CDRs with fresh ones...thing of being able to put all of your CDs(drivers, MP3s, etc) into your CD drive remotely !
I could use one of these for my Linux burner at home which is on DSL all the time...all my CDs available to me all the time !
Link to above mentioned robot: http://mindstorms.lego.com/products/vc/user4.asp
Reality is in the mind of the beholder - me 1996
all you have to do is get the cd software to eject the disk when done and a sensor(proxmity switch or something from radio shack. shouldnt be hard) switch the disks w/ the robot program. offhand i think eject will retract tray then you burn again. or you can probably string all of it together on the command line or a script or something so it all goes in sequence. burn,eject(open),unload/load,eject(close),burn....
Note that I HAVE NOT DONE THIS, but I considered it while pondering my CD -> MP3 migration.
Basically, you set up the CDR drive s.t. it burns whatever you want it to when the device closes. When it's done burning, eject it. The ejection nudges a light or touch sensor on the legoBot. The legoBot picks up the freshly burned CD, and drops it onto a spindle, then gets a new blank, inserts it into the drive, and closes the drive door.
The tough part would be getting the "pick up the new blank" part, since you could only pick up one, and the height of the stack of CDs would differ. I dunno, maybe something like "the Claw" from Toy Story would work.
Add a rooster and some fire, and Rube Goldberg would be proud.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I've been looking into this quite a bit lately.
These kooks going on about having it done by a "pro" are so full of shit. $1.50 per disc is a great deal? Ehr, what if these are promo discs?
Blanks are twenty cents in my neighborood?Besides, I very strongly suspect that most of these outfits do indeed simply hire someone to change the discs off of regular burners rather than using these way overpriced mechanized solutions. A buck fifty! Fuck that.
But enough ranting, what have I come up with?
Well first of all, I think an arm is not the way to go. The simplest thing I can come up with for the input is a conveyer belt that drops the loading disc into a shoot which lays it in place. Every time the player ejects, it hits a switch that advances the conveyer belt the length of a CD laying flat on the belt thus dumping the next CD into the shoot.
Of course before that can happen the old disc needs to be dumped. I think the simplest mechanical approach to that is a spinning wheel like a rubber RC car wheel that comes up from the bottom of the feeder tray on a little hydraulic jack. The wheel is offset from the center of the CD a bit, so it lifts the side of the CD and pulls it across the tray into a padded hopper.
I think that's a simple as it gets. Adapting an existing changer is probably an awesome idea, but I'm not in the States so E-Bay isn't an option for me and I haven't had a chance to try it.
I think a conveyer belt is going to be about as low tech as you can get and there's no reason you couldn't line up a hundred before you took off for work. It would be funky looking, but I think it's got a real chance of working. If I get something rigged together, I'll submit it as a story.
Personally, I'm quite into something like this. It's essential for people who have real live small businesses that need to cut costs wherever they can. Customers want to know where the costs come from and when you throw away money on bullshit services in order to get it done quick you've got to pass this along to the customer. When you're a small business and you've got lots of anaccountable expenses, you're toast.
Just publish the .iso image, and ask everyone on /. to burn a copy and mail it to you! You should have more copies than you can handle in about a week.
if you can integrate this little guy into your CD dupe project.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
im not looking at writing cd's so much as making like a juke box to switch through cd's, almost like a cd server. this is for home use so speed plays no role in this what so ever.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
Actually having experience in this field (I work at a CD Duplication warehouse and distributor) I can tell you that it is a hullava lot cheaper to just buy one that works out of the box. BUilding one, while it would be neat, would be a huge pain in the butt. If you're interested in saving money, as it sounds like you are, just buy one. http://www.superdups.com/duplicationsupplies
Let air pick up the CD. Apply a vacuum to the top of the cd, and air pressure will push up one CD and hold it there while you move it.
I've seen this work in a 1930s era printing press, and paper. It should work for CDs too though.
Let's assume you need to make 10,000 CDs.
:-)
You have a fast CD burner (24x) with which you can make perhaps 10 CDs per hour. That means 1000 hours for 10,000 CDs, or about 6 months. Assuming a wage of $6/hr, to pay someone to babysit this machine would be in the range of $6000. Plus your media cost of around $5000 if you're paying $0.50 per, including label. You are looking at $11,000. Ouch!
On the other hand, you could purchase an automated duplicator for $2500. Yup, that's a lot of money to lay down in one chunk. Now you're down to a month and a half (your duplicator can crank away 24/7, your schmuck 8/5). Your cost? $7500.
Of course, you could build a changer out of Lego Mindstorms for a hundred bucks plus your labor and have it up and running by April... 2003.
Or, you could just pay a replication house to press the CD's, print a fancy label on them, and get them to you in a week for probably $5,000 or less (wild guess). Remember, as quantity goes up, price per goes down. Way down. Don't let the "setup charge" scare you; consider the total cost and compare that with the total cost of one-at-a-timing it.
My boss has a saying: "A poor man can't afford cheap tools." You don't save money by buying cheap. If you skimp now, you'll spend a lot more later. If you do it right the first time, you won't have to do it right the second time.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
LEGOS!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Aquarium air pump...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
As some of you may know, I have pondered how to build a homebrew CD changer - something to allow you access to all (or most) of your CDs at one time. This problem is difficult, but not impossible.
CD Duplication is much easier.
Think of device as an "arm" that can move linearly on one axis, and travel up and down by a small amount on another orthogonal axis. So, basically a 2 axis pick-and-place arm.
Place two spindles on either side of the burning drive. One spindle is full of blanks, the other is empty (to hold burned blanks). Line the centers of the holes in the CDs up with each other, as well as with a CD in the drive tray with the tray ejected, so the all the holes fall perfectly in line. Mount the drive and the spindles down in some manner (screws, glue, something).
Now, you need to build an arm - a couple of cheap RC servos and some aluminium square tubing, maybe some threaded rod, so that it can move up and down, and move in and out along the line of the holes. Build a forked picking appendage out of aluminium tubing, with the ends of the fork bent down at a 90 degree angle - the clearance between the two "tines" of the forked tubing should be wide enough to clear the spindle. At the ends of the tines, attach cheap suction cups drilled through - seal them well to the tube ends. The fork needs to have a tee split off of it that will connect to a piece of silicone tubing that runs to an aquarium air pump - this tube will connect to the pumps air inlet (the pump may need modifications for this) to form a cheap, low cost, but efficient "vacuum pump".
The arms servos can be connected to a BASIC Stamp with appropriate driver software and hardware - the stamp can be programmed to simply accept commands to move the servos properly to certain amounts as sent over the serial port (via a MAX232). The Stamp will also need to be connected to some 120VAC relay (12 volt coil, 120VAC contacts), or a 120VAC solid state "relay" to allow control of the pump. Then code would have to be written to do the following:
1. Move the arm to the full spindle. Turn on vacuum pump, and lower fork to "suck up" the CD.
2. Lift arm, eject tray, position the CD, turn off pump to drop CD, inject tray.
3. Burn CD.
4. Eject CD, turn on vacuum pump, lower arm, "suck up" CD.
5. Move arm to second spindle, turn off pump and drop the CD - goto step 1.
Remember that at step one, your pile shrinks, and at step 5, the pile is growing, so you would need coding to account for that.
At any rate, such an arm could be easily built, probably for under $200.00 if you shopped carefully (and already had the burner).
Of course, if you don't have any experience building such devices (basically, homebrew robotics and electronics, plus coding) - you won't get very far, and I would have to concede that it would be more worth your time and money to purchase a machine, as other posters have reccommended...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I'm putting out a cd by a friends band. I'm getting it done professionally on silver-backed CD-r (it's a cd-r, but looks just like a CD). I decided to go for cd-r because I'm only doing 500.
At 500 quantity, Furnace CD (furnacecd.com) will do them for $0.89 each. Less than $500 bucks! That's a hell of a lot cheaper than me trying to build some crazy machine with a conveyor belt. Best thing is, I can give them my master on CD-R and get my CDs in less than a week (3 day turnaround).
Now, if I was getting more done, it would make sense to get them done as pressed CDs. I don't know the price break down for those, but they said that it becomes cost effective to do that at around 1,000 copies, because there are up front fees they make you pay for setting up the pressing machines.
Get them done somewhere, don't waste time trying to "engineer" some solution with rubber bands and legos...
Does your data have to be burned (i.e., are you sending different data to each disk?) or can you just create a master cd. If you can create a master, look into getting the CDs proffesionally pressed, its definately cheaper than your manhours+media. You just bring them a master and they can pump out disks for you at an incredible speed (think turn arround for an order of 1000 CDs in less than a week)
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
At school we have a robot arm. It is small. I think they were mainly made and sold for education purposes rather than industrial usage, based on the size and information video I've seen about it. Anway, in one of the videos, they show the gripper replaced with a suction cup (and a computer controller pump to provide the suction). With this attachment it would be pretty easy to do what you want.
The caviat is that supposedly this arm cost $20,000. I'd don't know what you would have to do to get a reasonable piece of equipment cheaper. If you used a vision system, you wouldn't need an arm that was quite a precise or stuck to it's calibration as well. But cheap arms (like the Radio Shack armitron line) aren't going to be as easy to get suction grippers for.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
This seems relevant.. a discussion of some people who have tried to do this with mindstorms..
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I personally like the idea of the suction cups
idea for picking up the cd's..
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=7
Do that thing two posts up, with the suction and everything but have springs under the cd's in the spindles. The spring lowers and brings up the cd's as when they are removed or put in the spindles!
Neat, ehh?