Twitch Plays a Giant Crane

The physical system at work!
The winch and carriage system
We tied a cup to it as an impromptu wrecking ball.

TABLE Q5

Inspiration

"Augmented reality" generally refers to a real-life scene overlaid with computer-generated content. We didn't see why the content had to be computer-generated.

What it does

We installed a massive room-sized motor-driver crane in one of the student lounges in our dormitory and streamed it on Twitch. Users can type commands into the Twitch chat to control how the crane moves.

How I built it

The software stack functions by connecting to Twitch chat through IRC and parsing all of the commands it finds. Commands are sent to GRBL controller, which translates the commands into coordinated stepper motor movements. A CoreXY system is used to move the actual structure.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This machine was built entirely out of parts that we found in our school's dumpster.

What I learned

In order to complete our project we had to learn and use skills we already had. We learned how to use an IRC bot to connect to Twitch's chat channel, how to program an Arduino to control our crane and how to use a raspberry pi to put it all together