Automating tasks with a robot sounds appealing, but not everyone has the budget for an Aismo or Kuka. [FABRI Creator] has a great tutorial on how to build your own mini robotic arm for small, repeatable tasks.
Walking us through the entire build, step-by-step, [FABRI Creator] shows us how to populate the custom-designed PCB and where to put every servo motor and potentiometer to bring the creation to life. This seems like a great project to start with if you haven’t branched out into motion systems before since it’s a useful build without anything too complicated to trip up the beginner.
Beyond the usual ability to use the arm to perform tasks, this particular device uses an Arduino Nano to allow you to record a set of positions as you move the arm and to replay it over and over. The video shows the arm putting rings on a stand, but we can think of all kinds of small tasks that it could accomplish for us, letting us get back to writing or hacking.
If controlling a robot arm with potentiometers sounds familiar, maybe you remember this robot arm with an arm-shaped controller.
assembly line huh, I suspect that thing can barely pick itself up.
Many people that work on an assembly line have that same problem…
Can you lift yourself?
Plus 1…
Yes.
yes.
I’ve bought kits for toys like that, but they invariably end up being too floppy with poor ability to return to specific poses.
Just don’t let it sue you like it did to Qualcomm
Wait, what? Link?
ARM is suing Qualcomm over licensing issues due to Qualcomm’s purchase of Nuvia.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/report-arm-cancels-qualcomms-architecture-license-endangering-its-chip-business/
LMAO
When was a kid decades ago radio shack I believe it was had a robot arm toy you controlled with a couple of joysticks. I ALWAYS wanted one of those then like 30 years later I found a perfectly working one at a garage sale and it was every bit as amazing as I’d remembered.
This thing looks like an even cooler version of that and if you can actually program it to do stuff for you that is even more awesome. Super cool build! Thanks!
Tomy/RadioShack Armatron ?
I loved my Armatron!
I would like to take Mini
I use this one in my assembly line:
https://www.hiwonder.com/products/maxarm?variant=40008714092631&srsltid=AfmBOoq7MAocxCJW6Ioi1sXCvoOAIS9BgKzRSACjF1T6ak6H4hokkgTU
I only paid $159 on Amazon, had to build a better suction cup, and connect a wire to the button that starts the procedure. You program the routine, and save it to the robot under a certain name and the button starts the routine. Supports inverse kinematics so you can program trajectories in Python, but I just need 2 routines for separate tasks so I took the lazy route and just wired in the button.
This robotic arm, and the others that are similarily built all use open loop controllers don’t they? I would be honestly tempted to get one if it had an encoder. I wonder when that will become standard?
Depends if you consider that the servo’s potentiometer is an encoder. A servomotor is closed loop since it knows where it is. But those cheap arms use cheap servo and the precision is very low, hence low repeatability since errors accumulates for each joint.
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/19/robot-arm-achieves-amazing-accuracy-with-just-servos/
And following the project on, it looks like he’s further refined the build a few months ago. Time for an update!
Seems like lot more useful than Elon’s clownBot.
Satisfactory machines with mini-robotic arms.
why I can t buy kit on aliexpress yet?
hm…..
chinese hate the open source
Reminds me of a Radio Shack toy my friend had when we were kids. Fun, but hardly useful. Still If it doesn’t cost too much, I would consider getting one.