Tesla Snake Arm v2

youmagine

For a long time, I've been itching to automate charging my electric car. When I stumbled upon Juan's design for a snake arm that mirrors Tesla's prototype, I thought, why not give it a shot? My car is already being juiced up by open-source electronics, but this project seemed like too much fun and too interesting to pass up. I'm planning to use computer vision with the Pixy CMUcam5 component to recognize the position and rotation of color codes. A pair of stickers needs to appear in the right spot before the final insertion is executed. I'm building on Juan Sirgado y Antico's original design, which can be found at www.thingiverse.com/thing:959891. My changes include making the snake body more parametric, smoothing out the cables' path for better movement, stripping away unnecessary "flesh" from the model, and reducing the size of the ball joint neck to accommodate a larger hole without sacrificing strength.