MeArm 3.0: The Pocket-Sized Robot Arm

June 26, 2023 by 14 Comments

We all might dream of having an industrial robot arm at our disposal, complete with working controller that doesn’t need constant maintenance and replacement parts, and which is able to help us with other projects with only a minimum of coding or instruction. That’s a pipe dream for most of us, as without a large space, sufficient funding, or unlimited amounts of troubleshooting time we’ll almost always have to look for something smaller and simpler. Perhaps something even as small as this pocket-sized robotic arm.

This isn’t actually the first time we’ve seen the MeArm; the small robot has been around since 2014 and has undergone a number of revisions and upgrades. Even this revision has been out for a little while now but this latest in the series is now available with a number of improvements over the older models. The assembly time required has been reduced from two hours to about 30 minutes and the hardware has even been fully open-sourced as well which allows virtually anyone with the prerequisite tools to build this tiny robot for whatever they happen to need it for, due to its very permissive licensing.

The linked Instructable goes into every detail needed for building the robot as well as documenting all of the parts needed, although you will need access to some specialty tools to make a lot of them. We also featured a Friday Hack Chat about these robots back in 2018 that has some interesting details about these robots in it, and although this is a relatively small robot in the grand scheme of things it’s always possible to upgrade to something larger in the future.

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Robotic Fox Is Part Dog, Part Cat — Just Like The Real Thing

June 8, 2023 by 8 Comments

Foxes are cat software running on dog hardware, or so they say. And [Will Cogley] seems to have taken that to heart with this 3D-printed robotic fox, which borrows heavily from projects like Boston Dynamics Spot robodog. True, the analogy breaks down a bit when you include MIT’s Cheetah on the inspiration list, but you get the point.

Very much a work in progress — [Will]’s RoboFox lacks both a head and a tail, which he aims to add at some point — there are some interesting design elements on display here. Whereas commercial quadruped robots tend to use expensive harmonic drives for the legs, [Will] chose simpler, cheaper hobby servos for his fox’s running gear. Each leg has three of them — one each for the upper and lower leg, and another that moves the whole leg in and out relative to the body. The dual-servo design for the leg is particularly interesting — one servo drives the upper leg directly, while the other servo drives the lower leg through a gear drive and a captive bearing arrangement connected to a parallelogram linkage. The result is a quite compact assembly that still has twelve degrees of freedom, and isn’t anywhere near as “floppy” as you might expect from something driven by hobby servos.

The video below shows off the design details as well as some of the fox’s construction, including some weirdly anatomically correct poses while it’s on its back. The fox is still getting its legs — you can see a few times when the servos get the jitters, and the umbilical is clearly a hindrance for such a lightweight robot. But [Will] has made a great start here, and we’re keen to see RoboFox progress. Although we’re not sure about giving the future head animatronic eyes.

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Automate Handwritten Postcards With Robots

May 29, 2023 by 15 Comments

As someone notorious for not doing things the old-fashioned manual way, we’re not sure by [Shane] of Stuff Made Here was thinking when he promised to send out a few hundred handwritten letters. Predictably he built an automated production line for the task. Video after the break.

With “handwritten” and “automated” not being particularly compatible, [Shane] set out to create a robot to create believable handwritten letters, which is significantly harder than it may seem at first glance. It turns out that turning your handwriting into a font is too consistent to be believable, which led down the rabbit of generated handwriting. [Shane] first spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to implement a machine learning model for the task, only to find there’s already an open source library good enough to fool a forensic handwriting expert.

On the robot side, [Shane] used a pen plotter from Amazon that’s it’s actually cheaper than building one from scratch. With the “handwriting” taken care of, [Shane] set up an automated loading system with the industrial robot arm he also used for his CNC chainsaw. The feeders for the empty and full postcards are 3D printed with a spring-loaded mechanism to keep the top card at the same height all the time.

Although this project contained less custom hardware and software than [Shane’s] other projects, it served as an excellent reminder that it’s unnecessary to reinvent the wheel when building a car. It’s easy to get caught up in the small details of a project that don’t matter much in the final implementation and usage.

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An orange and green stained glass robot arm sits on a table with a yellow lace tablecloth. It suspends a teabag over a brown teacup. You can see green leaves outside the window behind the bot.

Glass Robot From A Solarpunk Future

May 24, 2023 by 5 Comments

You may have heard of a heart of glass or have a glass jaw, but have you ever seen a glass robot?

[Simone Giertz], has taken two of her favorite things, stained glass and robotics, and fused them into a single project. Using an existing metal robot arm as a template, she cut and soldered her stained glass panels before reassembling the robot with its new solarpunk limbs. During testing though, one of the glass panels repeatedly failed at a solder joint.

Undaunted, [Giertz] replaced the faulty piece with an original metal component allowing this “grandma cyberpunk-core” bot to prepare tea as intended. We really love when makers bring us through the whole process, mishaps and all, and [Giertz] never disappoints in this respect. We do wonder a bit about the long-term health impacts of making tea with a robot containing leaded solder though.

If you’re interested in more robots made from unusual materials, checkout this gripper made from a dead spider or this work on phase changing robots.

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Arctos Robotics: Build A Robot Arm Out Of 3D Printer Spares?

May 8, 2023 by 11 Comments

ARCTOS is a 6-DOF robot arm based upon 3D printed mechanics running a modified version of GRBL firmware. Let’s get this straight now, the firmware is open source, but the hardware plans are a paid download, but for less than forty euros, we reckon the investment would be well worth it, judging from the quality of the build instructions and the software support already in place. Continue reading “Arctos Robotics: Build A Robot Arm Out Of 3D Printer Spares?” →

Retrotechtacular: Voice Controlled Typewriter Science Project In 1958

April 6, 2023 by 17 Comments

Hackaday readers might know [Victor Scheinman] as the pioneer who built some of the first practical robot arms. But what was a kid like that doing in high school? Thanks to a film about the 1958 New York City Science Fair, we know he was building a voice-activated typewriter. Don’t believe it? Watch it yourself below, thanks to [David Hoffman].

Ok, we know. Voice typing is no big deal today, and, frankly, [Victor’s] attempt isn’t going to amaze anyone today. But think about it. It was 1958! All those boat anchor ham radios behind him aren’t antiques. That’s what radios looked like in 1958. Plus, the kid is 16 years old. We’d say he did pretty darn good!

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Robot Hand Looks And Acts Like The Real Thing

March 16, 2023 by 25 Comments

Throughout history, visions of the future included human-looking robots. These days we have plenty of robots, but they don’t look like people. They look like disembodied arms, cars, and over-sized hockey pucks concealing a vacuum cleaner. Of course there’s still demand for humanoid robots like Commander Data, but there are many challenges: eyes, legs, skin, and hands. A company known as Clone may have the solution for that last item. The Clone Hand is “the most human-level musculoskeletal hand in the world,” according to the company’s website.

The 0.75 kg hand and forearm offer 24 degrees of freedom and two hours of battery life. It sports 37 muscles and carbon fiber bones. The muscle fibers can cycle over 650,000 times. You can watch the hand in action in the video below.

There is a hydraulic pump that the company likens in size to a human heart. The hand can also sense for feedback purposes. If you want to build your own, you’ll have to figure it out yourself. The Clone Hand is proprietary, but it does show what is in the art of the possible. The company claims they cost under $3,000, but it isn’t clear if that’s their cost or a projected future retail price.

Of course, human hands aren’t always the perfect robot manipulator. But when you need a realistic hand, you really need it. We see a lot of attempts at realistic hands, and we have to say they are getting better.

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