Carl Bugeja Debuts Microbots and Four Products for Miniaturized Robotics
Building on five years of research and experimentation to make products you can use in your projects.
Carl Bugeja is well known for creating innovative motors, coils, and simple robots out of printed circuit board substrates. So when a new video appears on Bugeja's YouTube channel, it is usually some wild, yet incredible, device. However, after seven years of one-off projects, Bugeja's latest video announces the creation of Microbots, a company focused on delivering components for miniaturized robotics. (And shows off some wild yet incredible devices!)
Bugeja teamed up with cousin Luke Sestito to form Microbots. The announcement introduces their first four ready-to-ship products, one of which is an exciting concept. The four products are iterations of Carl Bugeja's past Flexar actuators, PCB motors (coils), and flexible PCB projects.
DriveCell is a tiny (0.8 by 1 centimeter) h-bridge module for driving high current loads like brushed motors, LED strips, or other Microbots devices like CoilPad and FlatFlap. You control DriveCell with an Arduino via a library provided by Microbots.
The primary purpose of CoilCell is to move magnets on its surface. Microbots demonstrated how the coil embedded in the 1.6 millimeter PCB can create sound, vibrate small objects, or act as an actuator. The PCBs are squares measuring 18.5 by 18.5 millimeters. The interface pins are on a 2.54 millimeter pitch. However, they are slightly off-center. Bugeja says an ESP32-based controller is coming to mate with the boards in the future. A five-pack version is also available, which does not require soldering since the VCC and GND pins connect through the PCB.
A flexible variation of CoilCell is CoilPad. This unassuming, mostly circular device is an embedded coil in a flexible substrate with two exposed pads. You can attach it to flat or curved surfaces. It can act as a speaker, an inductor-capacitor (LC) oscillator, vibrate objects, or create heat (up to 100°C.)
FlatFlap is another thin, flexible component. These actuators are 2.6 millimeters thick with a built-in magnet. You can stick them onto lightweight, flat surfaces. The example in Bugeja's announcement video is a one-bit, seven-segment display. The display's "pixels" have a two-color material that indicates "on" or "off," depending on the angle at which light hits it. FlatFlap's force is not very strong, but it does work well with paper. For example, Microbots is testing a (not a real) Butterfly concept.
The decorative Butterfly is a flexible PCB design attached to FlatFlap. The PCB's dielectric and solder mask forms color patterns that look like a butterfly's wings while the flexibility replicates their flutter. However, these decorations cannot fly. (Yet?) This idea has yet to be a product, so if you are interested, sign up for a notification on the Not A Real Butterfly description page.
All four products are now available for sale! You can see applications, get more specs, and place orders at Microbots.io.