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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."
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!
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
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.
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...