Robot Arm

[Dave West]

I spent the last few weekends on and off designing and building this robot arm. It's cut from 1/8 inch tempered hardboard (great stuff) and hobby servos. Alot of measuring and redos later and it's almost finished. The wiring still has to be cleaned up and the base needs a re-design but it works.

RobotArm2.jpg
A netbook runs a servo sequencing program and commands a servo controller. Right now it just plays back recorded moves, but with the addition of a camera and imaging software it will be able to recognize, track and manipulate objects within it's reach.
Here's a video of it in action. Just the thing for moving tape from one place to another

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTttgWxoItw

Dave

[Larry Robinson]

Dave,

That is sooooooo cool. Keep us posted.

Larry

[Robert Walters]

Let me know when you get it to load/unload the laser and watch for fires =)

[Richard Rumancik]

Dave, that's really a neat project. Are you going to make the plans available in any way? How much would the motors and required electronics cost?

[paul mott]

Excellent project.

Paul.

[Dave West]

Once the design is the way I want I may post the files. The total cost for servos and controller was about $140.00 - $150.00. Hardboard was less than $5 for a 2X4 sheet. For the next version I may just buy metal servo brackets for most of the arm. They come with bearings and they're alot lighter too.

[AL Ursich]

When I worked at the San Diego Sony CRT Plant in the mid 90's we had a few Fanuc Robots to pick and place CRT's. In my area we had 2 Fanuc Welding Robots that just dipped a 4 inch paint roller in to a rolling metal drum of liquid carbon. It then painted 3 sides of a CRT to make the CRT a Capacitor with the inside carbon.

This Robot would have done the job of the multi Thousand dollar robot... Well Done !!!!!

AL

[Bill Cunningham]

Oooo Be careful.. Did you see that episode of The Big Bang Theory where Wolowitz built a robot arm?

[Russell Ludwick]

that thing is totally awesome. I always wished I had my own robot arm. Can you elaborate more on the software used to control the Servo's?

[Dave West]

that thing is totally awesome. I always wished I had my own robot arm. Can you elaborate more on the software used to control the Servo's?

The sequencing software came with the servo controller. It's a Pololu Mini-Maestro Servo Controller available from Pololu dot com.

Dave