I have an amateur and casual interest in robotics, from mechanical design to grasping and manipulation. In my first year of college, I played with the idea of building a 100lb. t-shirt shooting robot to drive around & eject shirts into crowds. We were very fortunate to get a bit of money from a student group on campus, access to the Columbia University MakerSpace, and a few dumpsters with nice DC motors and aluminum extrusion sitting around.
We spent a few months on-and-off between CAD, the machine shop, and our laptops. Here’s a linear actuator we designed to be powered by a 12V car window motor:
The whole assembly in CAD was built from several hundred custom & stock assets:
