MeArm 3.0: The Pocket-Sized Robot Arm

June 26, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 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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Hackaday Links: February 26, 2017

February 26, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

The MeArm Pi is a fantastic little robot kit that was the first place winner of the Enlightened Pi contest here on Hackaday. It’s crushing the Shitty Robots subreddit, and compared to the old MeArm kit, it’s much, much simpler to assemble. Ask me how I know. Now the MeArm Pi is a Kickstarter. This tiny robot arm is programmable in everything from Scratch to Perl. It’s highly recommended for children ages 8 to those wanting to recreate the opening scene of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

Almost a year ago, Lulzbot unveiled their latest 3D printer at the Midwest RepRap Festival. The Taz 6 is a great printer, but it’s a bit of a departure from their previous designs. The biggest change was the ‘brain box’, the controller box that encases the power supply, stepper drivers, and other associated electronics. Last year, Lulzbot said they would be selling this brain box by itself. It’s out now, ready for integration into your own self-built Taz, or a 3D printer of your own design.

Speaking of the Midwest RepRap Festival, it’s only a month away. It’s scheduled for March 25-26th at the Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds in Goshen, Indiana. Why the middle of nowhere? It ensures only the cool kids make it. For one weekend a year, Goshen, Indiana turns into the nexus of all things 3D printing. Don’t ask questions, just come. It’s free, although it would be cool if you kicked a few bucks over to the organizers.

[Clickspring] — the guy who built a fantastic clock in his home shop – is working on his second project. It’s an Antikythera Mechanism, and the latest episode is about building a gigantic gear. This is a unique approach to building an Antikythera Mechanism. [Clickspring] is still using modern tools, but he’s figuring out how this machine was built with tools available 2000 years ago.

Ogopogo, defeated by the Travelling Hacker Box.

Ogopogo. Champ is a picture of a log and Nessie is a toy submarine with a head made out of plastic wood. Ogopogo is a plesiosaur. Are you going to tell me a log – or at best a beaver – can kick the ass of a plesiosaur? Ogo. Pogo. Plesiosaur. The Travelling Hacker Box has conquered Ogopogo.

The ESP32 is quickly becoming the coolest microcontroller platform out there. You know what that means – Kickstarters! The FluoWiFi is Arduino-derived dev board featuring the ESP32 for WiFi, Bluetooth, and all the cool wireless goodies. This board also features an ATMega644p — basically the little sister to the ATMega1284p – for all your standard microcontroller Arduino stuff. It’s £25 for a board, which makes it pretty inexpensive for what you’re getting.

Pick-And-Place Machine For Candy

December 29, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield No comments

Every December and May the senior design projects from engineering schools start to roll in. Since the students aren’t yet encumbered with real-world detractors (like management) the projects are often exceptional, unique, and solve problems we never even thought we had. Such is the case with [Mark] and [Peter]’s senior design project: a pick and place machine that promises to solve all of life’s problems.

Of course we’ve seen pick-and-place machines before, but this one is different. Rather than identifying resistors and capacitors to set on a PCB, this machine is able to identify and sort candies. The robot — a version of the MeARM — has three degrees of freedom and a computer vision system to alert the arm as to what it’s picking up and where it should place it. A Raspberry Pi handles the computer vision and feeds data to a PIC32 which interfaces with the hardware.

One of the requirements for the senior design class was to keep the budget under $100, which they were able to accomplish using pre-built solutions wherever possible. Robot arms with dependable precision can’t even come close to that price restraint. But this project overcomes the lack of precision in the MeArm by using incremental correcting steps to reach proper alignment. This is covered in the video demo below.

Senior design classes are a great way to teach students how to integrate all of their knowledge into a final class, and the professors often include limits they might find in the real world (like the budget limit in this project). The requirement to thoroughly document the build process is also a lesson that more people could stand to learn. Senior design classes have attempted to solve a lot of life’s other problems, too; from autonomous vehicles to bartenders, there’s been a solution for almost every problem.

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Simple Robot Arm With Steppers Has Pleasingly Smooth Motion

May 2, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 16 Comments

The usual go-to when building a simple robot arm is the ever-pervasive hobby servo. However, these devices are not precise, and are typically jerky and unreliable. They have their advantages, but if strength is not needed a stepper motor would provide much better motion in the same price range.

Those are the lines along which [Bajdi] was thinking when he forked the Mearm project, and adapted it for small stepper motors. First he tried printing out the servo version on thingiverse. It worked, but the parts were not ideal for 3D printing, and he didn’t like the movement.

So he purchased some 28BYJ-48 motors. These are tiny little geared steppers that tend to show up in the odd project. He modified and simplified the files in FreeCAD. With the addition of a CNC shield and an Arduino he had every thing he needed for the upgrade. A servo is now only used for the gripper.

The robot is almost certainly weaker in its payload ability, but as you can see in the before and after videos after the break, it is dramatically smoother and more accurate.

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Connect Four Robot Uses Raspberry Pi

March 3, 2016 by Al Williams 5 Comments

Most people play games for entertainment. Hackers build robots to play games for entertainment. That’s what [piandchips] did. He used a Raspberry Pi and a MeArm kit to build a Connect 4-playing robot. The robot–named 4-Bot–has to do two things: the first is it has to be able to manipulate the pieces. Secondly, it has to be able to see the board. The MeArm imbues 4-Bot with the manipulation ability, and a clever scanning system does the trick.

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Hackaday Links: September 6, 2015

September 6, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

The MeArm is a cool little robot arm that can be controlled with just about any microcontroller. There’s a new version of it up on Thingiverse.

Here’s something to get kids interested in robotics: the GoBox is a robot kit with multiple ‘missions’ delivered monthly. The robot is based on the Raspberry Pi and Scratch – the Apple II and BASIC of today, I guess.

What happens when a popular electronics YouTuber completely debunks a product? Hundreds of dislikes appear on the YouTube videos he made. Hundreds of dislikes from Vietnam appeared on [Dave Jones]’ videos debunking the Batterizer. In fact, more people from Vietnam disliked the video than viewed it. Yes, weird YouTube dislike farms like this exist, and if you can do it on the Internet, you can also pay people to do it on the Internet.

The ESP8266 is slowly becoming a board that’s as easy to use as an Arduino. Now there’s a board that turns it into an Arduino.

The Vintage Computer Festival Midwest was last week, and [chris537a] shot a video of all the cool stuff. [vikram4819] put an album up on imgur. Yes, someone was selling a Sparcbook for $300. I’m holding out for a PowerPC ThinkPad, though…

Washington DC area hackers, don’t forget to RSVP for the Hackaday Meetup on Saturday. Bring a hack to show off and spend the evening socializing with the Hackaday community. Check out the announcement post for more info.