Do you know the name [George Devol]? Probably not. In 1961 he received a patent for “Programmed Article Transfer.” We’d call his invention the first robot arm, and its name was the Unimate. Unlike some inventors, this wasn’t some unrealized dream. [Devol’s] arm went to work in New Jersey at a GM plant. The 4,000 pound arm cost $25,000 and stacked hot metal parts. With tubes and hydraulics, we imagine it was a lot of work to keep it working. On the other hand, about 450 of the arms eventually went to work somewhere.
The Unimate became a celebrity with an appearance in at least one newsreel — see below — and the Johnny Carson show. Predictably, the robot in the newsreel was pouring drinks.
[Maurizio] built a robot arm, which is always a great accomplishment. But his project includes a very cool touch interface for an Android device that sets it apart from many other similar projects.You can see a very fast summary of the construction in the video below.
The design uses Fusion 360 and there are good explanations of each step in the process. The gripper is adapted from an existing design. Various 3D printed parts make up the wrist, shoulder, elbow, and rotating base.
This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi look at the week’s most interesting stories and projects, starting with the dystopian news that several people have had their bionic eye implants turn off without warning. We then pivot into an only slightly less depressing discussion about the poor security of Apple’s AirTags network and how it can be used to track individuals without their knowledge. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We’ll look at new projects designed to push the envelope of desktop 3D printing, and marvel at a DIY robotic arm build so accurate that it can put stitches in the skin of a grape. You’ll also hear about the surprisingly low cost of homebrew hydrophones, the uncomfortable chemistry behind wintergreen, and an early portable computer that looks like it came from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
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!
[Zhihui Jun] is a name you’re going to want to remember because this Chinese maker has created quite probably one of the most complete open-source robot arms (video in Chinese with subtitles, embedded below) we’ve ever seen. This project has to be seen to be believed. Every aspect of the design from concept, mechanical CAD, electronics design and software covering embedded, 3D GUI, and so on, is the work of one maker, in just their spare time! Sound like we’re talking it up too much? Just watch the video and try to keep up!
After an initial review of toy robots versus more industrial units, it was quickly decided that servos weren’t going to cut it – too little torque and lacking in precision. BLDC motors offer great precision and torque when paired with a good controller, but they are tricky to make small enough, so an off-the-shelf compact harmonic drive was selected and paired with a stepper motor to get the required performance. This was multiplied by six and dropped into some slick CNC machined aluminum parts to complete the mechanics. A custom closed-loop stepper controller mounts directly to the rear of each motor. That’s really nice too.
Stepper controller mounts on the motor rear – smart!
Control electronics are based around the STM32 using an ESP32 for Wi-Fi connectivity, but the pace of the video is so fast it’s hard to keep up with how much of the design operates. There is a brief mention that the controller runs the LiteOS kernel for Harmony OS, but no details we can find. The project GitHub has many of the gory details to pore over perhaps a bit light in places but the promise is made to expand that. For remote control, there’s a BLE-connected teaching device (called ‘Peak’) with a touch screen, again details pending. Oh, did we mention there’s a force-feedback (a PS5 Adaptive Trigger had to die for the cause) remote control unit that uses binocular cameras to track motion, with an AHRS setup giving orientation and that all this is powered by a Huawei Atlas edge AI processing system? This was greatly glossed over in the video like it was just some side-note not worth talking about. We hope details of that get made public soon!
Threading a needle through a grape by remote control
The dedicated GUI, written in what looks like Unity, allows robot programming and motion planning, but since those harmonic drives are back-drivable, the robot can be moved by hand and record movements for replaying later. Some work with AR has been started, but that looks like early in the process, the features just keep on coming!
Quite frankly there is so much happening that it’s hard to summarise here and do the project any sort of justice, so to that end we suggest popping over to YT and taking a look for yourselves.
My Singing Monsters is one of those mobile titles that has users play simple games to earn coins and gems in the usual way. [Anykey] found that his son was a fan of the game, but that sometimes it felt a little rigged. Thus, rather than waste time playing themselves, he set up a robot to do the job for them. (Super-boring video, embedded below.)
The player must complete a basic but time-consuming memory game. Upon winning, the player gets to choose a prize from 17 mystery cards. The top prize of 1,000 diamonds always seemed to be hidden under another card, leading to the aforementioned frustration.
In order to test if the game was rigged, [Anykey] set up a uArm Swift Pro to play the game, with the robot arm moving a small stylus over the iPad playing the game. The iPad’s video was piped to a PC via HDMI out, going into a Camlink capture card. A Python script using OpenCV was then created to play the game automatically, and log the results of prizes gained along the way. All the code is up on GitHub.
After over 100 attempts, the robot never managed to pick the right card to score 1,000 diamonds. Given that there are only 17 cards to choose from, one would expect the 1,000 diamond prize to come up several times in that many selections.
It seems then that the prize selection for completing the memory game may not actually be down to picking the right card. Instead, the prize given is selected by some other calculation entirely.
[Skyentific] is looking to push the hobbyist robotics state of the art. Motors and their gears, the actuators, are typically the most expensive part. For his build, he realised he needed big servos capable of delivering plenty of torque. Thus, he set about creating a 3D-printed design to get the job done on a budget. (Video, embedded below.)
Stepper motors are the order of the day here, chosen for their low cost compared to brushless solutions, particularly when taking control hardware into account. In this design, the stepper motor drives a sun gear as part of a bigger planetary gearbox with a high gear ratio. Cross-roller bearings are used to allow the servo to effectively handle both radial and axial loads. The servo as a whole is designed to fit neatly into the joints of the robot arm itself, and has external mounting points provisioned as such.
It’s a neat servo that somewhat apes those used on full-sized industrial designs, at least in the sense of being an integrated part of the joints of a robot arm. It also comes in at a relatively-cheap $32 based on the materials used by [Skyentific].
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams wade into a week of wonderful hacks. There’s an acrylic lens that hides images in the network of caustics: the light rays that shine through it. Boston Dynamics is finally showing the good stuff; people wrenching on ‘bots, and all kinds of high-end equipment failure, along with some epic successes. Can you grow better plants by inferring what they need by accurately weighing them? In more turbulent news, a police drone slammed into a Cessna mid-flight, the ISS went for an unexpected spin, and McDonald’s not-ice-cream machines have a whole new layer of drama around them.
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!
