Open Source Controller For Old And Expensive Industrial Robots

October 4, 2025 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

The Zynq-7000 usage at the core of the robot controller. (Credit: Excessive Overkill, YouTube)

Industrial robots like robotic arms are basically everywhere, albeit usually out of the public’s eye in factories. This also means that they get replaced and scrapped all the time, making for many opportunities to snap up an industrial robot that once cost as much as a pretty fancy car for essentially peanuts. Over the years the bloke behind the [Excessive Overkill] YouTube channel did this a lot, which also revealed the main issue with these ‘cheap’ robots: the electronics and associated software, with the manufacturer rarely going out of their way to appease to hobbyists trying to fix up one of these units, never mind for free.

That said, if you’re persistent enough, you can reverse-engineer these beasts to the point where you can develop your own controller hardware and software solution. This is exactly what was done, resulting in an open source controller, found on the ExcessiveMotion GitHub page, that should allow you to control many of these industrial robots. At the core is a Zynq-7000 hybrid FPGA-ARM SoC chip, running real-time Linux (with preemptive scheduling patch) on the SoC side and custom HDL on the FPGA side to handle the hard real-time tasks.

The controller during testing. (Credit: Excessive Overkill, YouTube)

The controller is made to be modular, with a backplane that can accept various interface cards in addition to the current RS-485 and RS-422 interfaces that are commonly used in industrial settings, such as here for controlling the individual servo drives of the robots. To make assembly and testing interesting, the first controller and integration with a robot was made ready for display at the Open Sauce 2025 event, requiring things to be rushed along, including reverse-engineering the servo protocol for a small-ish industrial robot suitable for public display and use, as well as developing the kinematics for the robotic arm.

With the controller now demonstrated, clearly this is the perfect time to rush out and get one of these fun industrial robots for a few hundred bucks. Currently the controller is still being finalized, with the author asking for feedback on what it should be able to support. If you have a particularly unusual industrial robot lounging around without the requisite controller, this might be your chance to revive it.

Thanks to [Hans] for the tip.

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WALL-E’s Forgotten Sibling Rebuilt

September 28, 2025 by Al Williams 5 Comments

Do you remember the movie WALL-E? Apparently, [Leviathan engineering] did, and he wasn’t as struck by the title character, or Eva, or even the Captain. He was captivated by BURN-E. His working model shows up in the video below.

We’ll be honest. BURN-E didn’t ring a bell for us, though we remember the movie. He grabbed a 3D design for the robot on the Internet and planned out holes for some servos and other hardware.

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Robot Bartender Is The Life Of The Party

September 26, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

As the old saying goes, when the only tool you have is a 6 DOF industrial robotic arm, every problem looks like an opportunity to make it serve up adult beverages. [benkokes] found himself in this familiar predicament and did what any of us would do, but his process wasn’t without a few party fouls as well as a few head-scratchers.

One of the common problems that people who suddenly find themselves with an old industrial robot have is that there’s usually no documentation or instructions. This was true here with the added hiccup of the robot’s UI being set to Chinese. Luckily no one had changed the root password, and eventually he was able to get the robot up and working.

Getting it to make drinks was a different matter altogether. [benkokes] needed a custom tool to hold the cup as well as shake it, and 3D printed a claw-style end effector with a lid. Out of his multi-colored pack of party cups, however, the orange cups were different enough in dimension to cause problems for the shaking lid which was discovered when the robot spilled a drink all over the table.

Eventually, though, the robot was successfully serving drinks at a party. One of [benkokes]’s friends happened to be a puppet maker and was able to outfit it with a tailored tuxedo for the party as well, and he also programmed it to dance in between serving drinks, completing the AI revolution we have all been hoping for. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a common project for people who suddenly come to posses a large general-purpose industrial robot, while others build robots specifically for this task alone.

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Robot Balances Ball On A Plate

September 22, 2025 by Lewin Day 26 Comments

Imagine trying to balance a heavy metal ball bearing on a cafeteria tray. It’s not the easiest thing in the world! In fact, it’s perhaps a task better automated, as [skulkami3000] demonstrates with this robotic build.

The heart of the build is a flat platform fitted with a resistive touchscreen panel on top. The panel is hooked up to a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller. When a heavy ball bearing is placed on the touch panel, the Teensy is thus able to accurately read its position. It then controls a pair of NEMA 17 stepper motors via TCM2208 drivers in order to tilt the panel in two axes in order to keep the ball in the centre of the panel. Thanks to its quick reactions and accurate sensing, it does a fine job of keeping the ball centred, even when the system is perturbed.

Projects like these are a great way to learn the basics of PID control. Understanding these concepts will serve you well in all sorts of engineering contexts, from controlling industrial processes to building capable quadcopter aircraft. Continue reading “Robot Balances Ball On A Plate” →

Talking Robot Uses Typewriter Tech For Mouth

August 8, 2025 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

Many decades ago, IBM engineers developed the typeball. This semi-spherical hunk of metal would become the heart of the Selectric typewriter line. [James Brown] has now leveraged that very concept to create a pivoting mouth mechanism for a robot that appears to talk.

What you’re looking at is a plastic ball with lots of different mouth shapes on it. By pivoting the ball to different angles inside the head of a robot, it’s possible to display different mouth shapes on the face. By swapping mouth shapes rapidly in concert with recorded speech, it’s possible to make the robot appear to be speaking. We don’t get a great look at the mechanism that operates the ball, but Selectric typeball operation is well documented elsewhere if you seek to recreate the idea yourself.

The real benefit of this mechanism is speed. It might not look as fluid as some robots with manually-articulated flexible mouths, but the rapid mouth transitions really help sell the effect because they match the pace of speech. [James] demonstrated the finished product on Mastodon, and it looks great in action.

This isn’t the first time we’ve featured [James Brown]’s work. You may recall he got DOOM running on a tiny LEGO brick a few years back.

Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip!

Reachy The Robot Gets A Mini (Kit) Version

July 25, 2025 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

Reachy Mini is a kit for a compact, open-source robot designed explicitly for AI experimentation and human interaction. The kit is available from Hugging Face, which is itself a repository and hosting service for machine learning models. Reachy seems to be one of their efforts at branching out from pure software.

Our guess is that some form of Stewart Platform handles the head movement.

Reachy Mini is intended as a development platform, allowing people to make and share models for different behaviors, hence the Hugging Face integration to make that easier. On the inside of the full version is a Raspberry Pi, and we suspect some form of Stewart Platform is responsible for the movement of the head. There’s also a cheaper (299 USD) “lite” version intended for tethered use, and a planned simulator to allow development and testing without access to a physical Reachy at all.

Reachy has a distinctive head and face, so if you’re thinking it looks familiar that’s probably because we first covered Reachy the humanoid robot as a project from Pollen Robotics (Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025.)

The idea behind the smaller Reachy Mini seems to be to provide a platform to experiment with expressive human communication via cameras and audio, rather than to be the kind of robot that moves around and manipulates objects.

It’s still early in the project, so if you want to know more you can find a bit more information about Reachy Mini at Pollen’s site and you can see Reachy Mini move in a short video, embedded just below.

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A Lockpicking Robot That Can Sense The Pins

July 21, 2025 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

Having a robot that can quickly and unsupervised pick any lock with the skills of a professional human lockpicker has been a dream for many years. A major issue with lockpicking robots is however the lack of any sensing of the pins – or equivalent – as the pick works its magic inside. One approach to try and solve this was attempted by the [Sparks and Code] channel on YouTube, who built a robot that uses thin wires in a hollow key, load cells and servos to imitate the experience of a human lockpicker working their way through a pin-tumbler style lock.

Although the experience was mostly a frustrating series of setbacks and failures, it does show an interesting approach to sensing the resistance from the pin stack in each channel. The goal with picking a pin-tumbler lock is to determine when the pin is bound where it can rotate, and to sense any false gates from security pins that may also be in the pin stack. This is not an easy puzzle to solve, and is probably why most lockpicking robots end up just brute-forcing all possible combinations.

Perhaps that using a more traditional turner and pick style approach here – with one or more loadcells on the pick and turner- or a design inspired by the very effective Lishi decoding tools would be more effective here. Regardless, the idea of making lockpicking robots more sensitive is a good one, albeit a tough nut to crack. The jobs of YouTube-based lockpicking enthusiasts are still safe from the robots, for now.

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