We all think we could use a third arm from time to time, but when we actually play this thought experiment out in our heads we’ll eventually come to the same hurdle [caltadaniel] found, which is a lack of a controller. His third arm isn’t just an idea, though. It’s a Yaskawa industrial robot that he was able to source for pretty cheap, but it was missing a few parts that he’s been slowly replacing.
The robot arm came without a controller or software, but also without any schematics of any kind, so the first step was reverse engineering the wiring diagram to get an idea of what was going on inside the arm. From there some drivers were built for the servos, but the key to all of it is the homemade controller. The inverse kinematics math was done in Python and runs on an industrial PC. Once it was finally all put together [caltadaniel] had a functioning robotic arm for any task he could think of.
Interestingly enough, while he shows the robot brushing his teeth for him, he also set it up to flip the switch of a useless machine that exists only to turn itself off. There’s something surreal about a massive industrial-sized robotic arm being used to turn on a $20 device which will switch itself back off instantly, but the absurdity is worth a watch.
More surreal would be changing the robot into a useless device. Like, you flip the switch and robot flips it back. That way it;s useless arm.
wow!!
My employers do translations for Yaskawa. I associate them mainly with immensely long PDF manuals for motor controllers. I didn’t know they made industrial robots as well.
For Nasa no less.
Say…. overkilll! XD
Okay, I laughed when it played the McGyver music.
We use multiple yaskawa robots at work. This is pretty impressive compared the giant network of PLC related stuff they shove inside ours.
That was awesome. Once the cat got involved thinking he was going to fix all of this. Priceless.
The internet need more cat in tech videos! lol
Hey !!!! Maybe they are brothers!!! I also got a very cheap old Yaskawa robot a few months ago and resurrected it, I also didn’t have a controller and a damaged encoder. I am designing a modular PCB to integrate everything, I have built it with 7 arduinos and 36 MOSFET. The control software is in Python to create Gcode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI9NenNtuzE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2_FbRkYfZc