Hacklet 30 – Robot Arm Projects

January 16, 2015 by Adam Fabio 2 Comments

Robot arms – they do everything from moving silicon wafers to welding cars. Many a hacker has dreamt of having their own robot arm to ~~serve them beer~~ help them build projects. This week’s Hacklet features some of the best robot arm projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [4ndreas] who is building this incredible 3D Printable Robot Arm. Inspired by large industrial robots, [4ndreas] has given us an entirely 3D printable design. [4ndreas’] 3D design experience really shows here. This arm looks like it just finished work at a local assembly line! The arm is BIG too – printing the parts took him about a week, and used around 1.2kg of ABS filament! [4ndreas] has recently split the project off into two halves: his blue arm is driven by stepper motors, while the orange arm is a DC motor affair. Both of the arms can use his awesome gripper design. Check out the project page for videos of the arm in action!

Next up is [Dan Royer] and his 6DOF Robot Arm. [Dan’s] didn’t want to spend upwards of $10,000 on an industrial arm, so he built his own from wood, plastic, and easily obtainable parts. As the name implies, the arm has 6 degrees of freedom. The electronics consist of beefy NEMA 17 stepper motors and a RUMBA controller, which was originally designed for 3D printers. Dan even created some novel encoder mounts. Each joint has an encoder, which will allow the robot to run as a closed loop system. [Dan] originally entered this arm in The Hackaday Prize 2014. While it didn’t get him to space, we’re betting it will be able to get him a soda!

No robot arm Hacklet would be complete without featuring [ben.phenoptix] and the awesome MeArm. MeArm is a pocket-sized robot arm which uses tiny 9 gram servos for locomotion. It’s built from laser cut acrylic and standard hardware. We loved the MeArm so much that we featured it as one of the challenges in our Embedded Hardware Workshop in Munich. More recently, [Ben] and MeArm have had a great run on Kickstarter. Let’s hope those arms are good at stuffing, addressing, and mailing out packages!

Finally we have [Kenji Larsen] with Reactron material transporter. The material transporter is just a small part of [Kenji’s] larger Reactron project. It started with an OWI-535 robot arm. The OWI is really a toy – a plastic kit which builds an open loop DC motor driven arm. [Kenji] has put some serious time into modifying his particular arm. He experimented with molding his own potentiometers for each joint before settling on a printed circuit board based design. Once the new system was in place, he found that his resistors were good for about 10,000 cycles. Not bad for a modified toy!

There are quite a few robot arm projects we weren’t able to cover in this edition of The Hacklet – you can check them all out on our brand new Robot Arm Projects List!

That’s it for this Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Wood Shines In This SCARA Robotic Arm Project

September 13, 2018 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

[igarrido] has shared a project that’s been in the works for a long time now; a wooden desktop robotic arm, named Virk I. The wood is Australian Blackwood and looks gorgeous. [igarrido] is clear that it is a side project, but has decided to try producing a small run of eight units to try to gauge interest in the design. He has been busy cutting the parts and assembling in his spare time.

Besides the beautifully finished wood, some of the interesting elements include hollow rotary joints, which mean less cable clutter and a much tidier assembly. 3D printer drivers are a common go-to for CNC designs, and the Virk I is no different. The prototype is driven by a RAMPS 1.4 board, but [igarrido] explains that while this does the job for moving the joints, it’s not ideal. To be truly useful, a driver would need to have SCARA kinematic support, which he says that to his knowledge is something no open source 3D printer driver offers. Without such a driver, the software has no concept of how the joints physically relate to one another, which is needed to make unified and coherent movements. As a result, users must control motors and joints individually, instead of being able to direct the arm as a whole to move to specific coordinates. Still, Virk I might be what’s needed to get that development going. A video of some test movements is embedded below, showing how everything works so far.

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Project Giant Robot Arm

December 26, 2015 by James Hobson 21 Comments

[Antoniopenamaria] is working on a giant robot arm. The beauty is, he’s posting a step-by-step guide (translated) of his entire journey from start to finish.

Why does he want to build a giant robot arm? Well, the idea originally came to him a few years ago when he was soldering something together and thought, “Man, I could really use another hand!”. So he got out a Meccano set, and built a mini robot arm. Nothing fancy, but it worked. From there, he decided to program it, and was able to teach it to move things from point A to point B… as he continued to expand on his little project, the vision grew, and now he’s working on project D.I.M.E.R. — a giant robot arm.

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A robot that detects whether you are awake and gently taps you if not.

Wake-Up Robot Does It Gently

December 3, 2021 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

For hundreds of years, people have fallen asleep while reading in bed late at night. These days it’s worse, what with us taking phones to the face instead when we start to nod off. At least they don’t have pointy corners like books. While you may not want to share your bedroom with a robot, this wake-up robot by [Norbert Zare] may be just the thing to keep you awake.

Here’s how it works: a Raspberry Pi camera on a servo wanders around at eye level, and the Pi it’s attached to uses OpenCV to determine whether those eyes are open or starting to get heavy. The bot can also speak — it uses eSpeak to introduce itself as a bot designed not to let you sleep. Then when it catches you snoozing, it repeatedly intones ‘wake up’ in a bored British accent.

We were sure that the thing was designed to slap [Norbert] in the face a la [Simone Giertz]’s robot alarm clock, but no, that long-fingered hand just slowly swings down and gently taps [Norbert] on the arm (or whatever is in the path of the slappy hand). Check out the short demo and build video after the break.

Do you want to be awoken even more gently? Try a sunlight lamp. We’ve got dozens in stock, but this one gradually gets about as bright as the sun.

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Hackaday Podcast 143: More Magnesium Please, Robot Bicep Curls, Malamud’s General Index, And Are You Down With EMC?

November 5, 2021 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams catch up on a week’s worth of hacks. Get a grip on robot hands: there’s an eerily human one on offer this week. If you’re doing buck/boost converter design, the real learning is in high-frequency design patterns that avoid turning your circuits into unintentional radiators. Those looking for new hobbies might want to take up autonomous boat racing. We saw a design that’s easy enough to print on the average 3D printer — and who doesn’t want to build their own jet boat? We’ll wrap up the episode by digging into magnesium sources, and by admiring the number of outfits who are rolling their own silicon these days.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (50 MB)

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Hacking The Mekamon Robot To Add New Capabilities

November 3, 2021 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

The Mekamon from Reach Robotics is a neat thing, a robot controlled by a phone app that walks on four legs. [Wes Freeman] decided to hack the platform, giving it a sensor package and enabling some basic autonomous behaviours in the process.

[Wes] started out by using a packet sniffer to figure out the command system for controlling the Mekamon robot over Bluetooth. Then, he set about fitting a Raspberry Pi 3 on the ‘bot, along with a Pi Camera on a gimballed camera head.

Running OpenCV on the Raspberry Pi gives the Mekamon robot the ability to follow a colored ball placed in its field of vision. Later work involved upgrading the hardware to a Pi Compute Module 3, with its dual camera inputs allowing for the use of a stereo imaging setup.

All the parts simply ziptie on top of the original robot, with no permanent changes needed. It’s a neat way of hacking, by expanding the original capabilities without actually having to tamper within.

We’ve seen plenty of autonomous builds over the years, from farming robots to those designed to explore the urban environment. Video after the break.

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RC car without a top, showing electronics inside.

Fast Indoor Robot Watches Ceiling Lights, Instead Of The Road

October 25, 2021 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Andy]’s robot is an autonomous RC car, and he shares the localization algorithm he developed to help the car keep track of itself while it zips crazily around an indoor racetrack. Since a robot like this is perfectly capable of driving faster than it can sense, his localization method is the secret to pouring on additional speed without worrying about the car losing itself.

The regular pattern of ceiling lights makes a good foundation for the system to localize itself.

To pull this off, [Andy] uses a camera with a fisheye lens aimed up towards the ceiling, and the video is processed on a Raspberry Pi 3. His implementation is slick enough that it only takes about 1 millisecond to do a localization update, netting a precision on the order of a few centimeters. It’s sort of like a fast indoor GPS, using math to infer position based on the movement of ceiling lights.

To be useful for racing, this localization method needs to be combined with a map of the racetrack itself, which [Andy] cleverly builds by manually driving the car around the track while building the localization data. Once that is in place, the car has all it needs to autonomously zip around.

Interested in the nitty-gritty details? You’re in luck, because all of the math behind [Andy]’s algorithm is explained on the project page linked above, and the GitHub repository for [Andy]’s autonomous car has all the implementation details.

The system is location-dependent, but it works so well that [Andy] considers track localization a solved problem. Watch the system in action in the two videos embedded below.

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