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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."
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!"
- a shopvac has more than enough power, even if the hose is sucking through the hole of the CDrom.
Actually, too much power, too much noise, too big, and to control it, you need to control a 120V motor.
- A wimpy CPU fan doesn't have enough power to hold a CDrom. Much less to pick one up if things aren't in perfect alignment. (This particular CPU fan wasn't powerfull enough to keep my Athlon cool, that's why it was available for experiments.)
So a question for those who know pneumatics:What is a good cheap, small, relatively quiet fan/blower/pump for a robotic pick and place CD changer?
I think I'll probably take apart a cordless vacuum cleaner and use its blower.
My application is unattended archiving of data to CDroms. 2 copies of each CDrom is enough for me. One copy of 10 Gbytes of data takes about 15 CDroms. Pretty cheap if there isn't labor involved in swapping the CDs.
all my CDs available to me all the time !
You want the Plextor MegaPlex 200.
That's assuming that you have the $5500 you need to buy one, of course.
The problem would be to get a vacuum or use a suction cup with the hole in the middle of the cd.
Who says you have to pick it up from the middle? Just use two suction cups on either side of the hole, or four for a pattern around the hole.
x
xox
x
or
xox
where o = the hole and x = suction cups
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.....
dont need to write the software....just install a bunch of burners on a RAID machine, and ebable the "multiple burner support" on Ahead Nero Burning ROM and away you go.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
If you've got the pile of CD's sitting on a spindle, then how about using two "fingers" to grip the top CD by the edges. I'm thinking of something along the lines of two longish pieces of metal / plastic with a soft plastic / rubber /silicon coating. Set them at about a 20-30 degree angle from the vertical and at a width where they can be lowered down to encompass the spindle of CDs.
Once lowered they close in to grip the top CD. The angle should enable them to close in on only the top CD and lift that off the spindle leaving the others behind.
The main problem I can think of is that they will need to close a different amount for the top CD compared to the lowest CD. I don't know enough about robotics to know whether a pressure feedback sensor can be rigged up to steer this. When it "feels" that it has gripped the top CD it stops closing.
The other problem is that in my experience, CDs on a spindle won't separate from gravity alone. Lift the top one and at least one more will follow with it. Perhaps one would need to go through the spindle manually first and separate all the CDs.
A little planning goes a long way...