…Says a buddy of mine after I send him a picture of this via text message. Well, to answer the question, it’s a robotic DVD changer that I built. Since I am moving 2000 miles away and I have a couple hundred DVDs that I want to be able to watch, but don’t want to bring with, I built this thing to automate ripping the DVDs to my hard drive.

Ingredients:

• One computer with DVD drive and lots of free hard drive space
• A bunch of wood and screws (and a table saw and drill press)
• One LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit
• Two 3-foot steel rods that fit through the holes on the LEGO pieces
• Some string and electrical tape
• DVD Shrink
• AutoHotKey
• NeXTTool
• My AutoHotKey script and my NXT program (I’ll probably make these available later)
• A big pile of DVDs to rip
• A LOT of patience

I got the robot to the point where it’s smart enough to detect if it fails to pick up a disc, or if it drops it before it’s supposed to. It also checks the battery voltage of the NXT unit to see if I need to come change the batteries. If it finds that there is a problem it can’t handle by itself, it stops what it’s doing and sends a text message to my cell (by using Wget along with Google Send To Phone) explaining what’s going on.

I did also have to slightly “modify” (a.k.a. mutilate) 2 LEGO pieces as well. I had to file down a little bit of the sides on the pieces that make that little orange beak at the bottom, then wrap some tiny strips of electrical tape around them in order to get it to actually grip a DVD.

Lots of inspiration came from these two guys:
http://redfrontdoor.org/cd-changer.html
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/changer.html

To be honest, I probably could have manually ripped all my DVDs in the time it took to build this thing and get it working properly, but what’s the fun in that?

Tags: Computers, Pictures, Projects, Toys