Sep.8, 2013
Andy Ayre had a problem. His wife has been collecting DVDs for the last 15 years and now they don't have enough space for them. So he decided to start ripping the DVDs to a media server. As you can image, ripping is a slow process and every hour he had to feed the computer another disc. Andy got tired of that and decided to find another solution.
Andy turned to 3D printing. He wanted to build a robot to perform the disc changing for him.
With a new 3D printer he just acquired, Andy set to work on designing the robot, he called it Jack the Ripper.
Jack the Ripper has two trays and one arm.
A stack of discs are placed into the "in tray". An arm moves over to the stack and grabs the top disc. The disc is then lowered into the drive tray. Ripping takes place. Once complete the disc is removed from the drive tray and the arm takes it over to the "out tray" and places it there.
The robot is controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and an old laptop is used to control the overall process and the ripping. The laptop can rip a DVD in about 1 hour 15 minutes. The in tray is designed to hold 24 discs - that means about 28 hours of ripping time. Andy says it is also possible to increase the capacity of the in tray and the out tray if your PC is faster than his laptop.
All files, including a complete bill of materials, the software and part source files and STLs are uploaded to github. The files are licensed under GPLv3. If you like to build one for yourself, click on this link for more information on Andy's website.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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