Ski Waxing Robot v2

Motivation

To eliminate the simple and repetitive task of waxing your skis at home, something I personally do quite frequently during the ski season.

Overall Design

• I wanted the footprint to be small, therefore, I made the robot move instead of the ski. Most industrial ski tuning machines move the ski against the grinding and waxing wheels, but require a larger base footprint and at least 2x the length of the ski of free space.
• The challenge with making the robot move is having enough grip to scrape and brush the dry wax off the ski, which requires a considerable amount of force.

First Prototype

• Here is a look at the first prototype using DC motors, mouse traps, and rubber brayers:
• In the video it is slipping on the hot wax, a problem to be solved...later.
• It is simply controlled with a DC motor controller and a Raspberry Pi

Control Through Flask App

• I made a simple Flask/React App to control the robot.
• The app is hosted on the robot’s Raspberry Pi.
• Tbh, this is kinda useless as the point is for the robot to wax the skis by itself, but I wanted to try out Flask. Though a webapp and dashboard is desirable to view data from the robot.

Adding A Battery Pack and VCSEL Sensors

• Added a battery pack of 3x 18650’s which should be able to run the 2 DC motors for 1.8hr if using the batteries max capacity, but probably more like ~1hr.
• Added voltage monitor to battery pack.
• Added 2x VL6180x VCSEL (used in solid state LiDAR) time-of-flight distance sensors to detect the end of the ski so that I don’t have to manually move the robot back and forth.