Real life has finally slowed down enough to have time to build. After showing
off my robots at an elementary school in another town for three days, I got a
huge burst of energy.
My first creation was a new kind of pneumatic inchworm. It uses the late, great
Eric Brok's pneumatic control timing circuit as seen here
Inchworm 3 uses four of Eric's timing circuits hooked together so that all four
timers stay synchronized. Inchworm 3 has two waves traveling down its body at a
time as can be seen in this picture:
Inchworm 2 (shown here http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=127600)
had some issues with locking up as the wave passed the midsection. I fixed this
originally by adding more pistons in the middle, but eventually made a slight
change to the geometry of the body segments.
Inchworm 3 is extremely reliable, and travels faster than its predecessors.
