LeRobot Brings Autonomy To Hobby Robots

August 23, 2025 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

Robotic arms have a lot in common with CNC machines in that they are usually driven by a fixed script of specific positions to move to, and actions to perform. Autonomous behavior isn’t the norm, especially not for hobby-level robotics. That’s changing rapidly with LeRobot, an open-source machine learning framework from the Hugging Face community.

The SO-101 arm is an economical way to get started.

If a quick browse of the project page still leaves you with questions, you’re not alone. Thankfully, [Ilia] has a fantastic video that explains and demonstrates the fundamentals wonderfully. In it, he shows how LeRobot allows one to train an economical 3D-printed robotic arm by example, teaching it to perform a task autonomously. In this case, the task is picking up a ball and putting it into a cup.

[Ilia] first builds a dataset by manually operating the arm to pick up a ball and place it in a cup. Then, with a dataset consisting of only about fifty such examples, he creates a machine learning model capable of driving the arm to autonomously pick up a ball and place it in a cup, regardless of where the ball and cup actually are. It even gracefully handles things like color changes and [Ilia] moving the cup and ball around mid-task. You can skip directly to 34:16 to see this autonomous behavior in action, but we do recommend watching the whole video for a highly accessible yet deeply technical overview.

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Robot Gets A DIY Pneumatic Gripper Upgrade

April 25, 2025 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

[Tazer] built a small desktop-sized robotic arm, and it was more or less functional. However, he wanted to improve its ability to pick things up, and attaching a pneumatic gripper seemed like the perfect way to achieve that. Thus began the build!

The concept of [Tazer]’s pneumatic gripper is simple enough. When the pliable silicone gripper is filled with air, the back half is free to expand, while the inner section is limited in its expansion thanks to fabric included in the structure. This causes the gripper to deform in such a way that it folds around as it fills with air, which lets it pick up objects. [Tazer] designed the gripper so that that could be cast in silicone using 3D printed molds. It’s paired with a 3D printed manifold which delivers air to open and close the gripper as needed. Mounted on the end of [Tazer]’s robotic arm, it’s capable of lifting small objects quite well.

It’s a fun build, particularly for the lovely sounds of silicone parts being ripped out of their 3D printed molds. Proper ASMR grade stuff, here. We’ve also seen some other great work on pneumatic robot grippers over the years.

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Learn About Robot Arms By Building Pedro 2.0

November 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

Whether you’re a kid or a kid at heart, learning about science and engineering can be a lot more fun if it’s practical. You could sit around learning about motors and control theory, or you could build a robot arm and play with it. If the latter sounds like your bag of hammers, you might like Pedro 2.0.

Pedro 2.0 is a simple 3D-printable robot arm intended for STEAM education. If you’re new to that acronym, it basically refers to the combination of artistic skills with education around science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The build relies on components that are readily available pretty much around the world—SG90 servo motors, ball bearings, and an Arduino running the show. There’s also an NRF24L01 module for wireless remote control. All the rest of the major mechanical parts can be whipped up on a 3D printer, and you don’t need a particularly special one, either. Any old FDM machine should do the job just fine if it’s calibrated properly.

If you fancy dipping your toes in the world of robot arms, this is a really easy starting point that will teach you a lot along the way. From there, you can delve into more advanced designs, or even consider constructing your own tentacles. The world really is your ~~octopus~~ oyster.

Mini Robotic Arm Lets You Start Your Own Mini Assembly Line

October 24, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 25 Comments

Automating tasks with a robot sounds appealing, but not everyone has the budget for an Aismo or Kuka. [FABRI Creator] has a great tutorial on how to build your own mini robotic arm for small, repeatable tasks.

Walking us through the entire build, step-by-step, [FABRI Creator] shows us how to populate the custom-designed PCB and where to put every servo motor and potentiometer to bring the creation to life. This seems like a great project to start with if you haven’t branched out into motion systems before since it’s a useful build without anything too complicated to trip up the beginner.

Beyond the usual ability to use the arm to perform tasks, this particular device uses an Arduino Nano to allow you to record a set of positions as you move the arm and to replay it over and over. The video shows the arm putting rings on a stand, but we can think of all kinds of small tasks that it could accomplish for us, letting us get back to writing or hacking.

If controlling a robot arm with potentiometers sounds familiar, maybe you remember this robot arm with an arm-shaped controller.

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Tinkering With Klipper: Making The ManiPilator Robotic Arm

October 6, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 15 Comments

[Leo Goldstien]’s entry into the world of robotics has been full of stops and starts. Like many beginners, he found traditional robotics instructions overwhelming and hard to follow, bogged down with dense math that often obscured the bigger picture. So he decided to approach things differently and create something with his own hands. The result? A 3D-printed robotic arm he affectionately calls “ManiPilator.”

This article is the first in a three-part series documenting [Leo]’s hands-on approach to learning robotics from the ground up. Building ManiPilator became an opportunity to learn by doing, and the project took him on a journey of experimenting, failing, and eventually succeeding in tasks that seemed deceptively simple at first glance. Each hurdle provided him with insights that more traditional learning methods hadn’t delivered. Below is one of the videos [Leo] captured, to show one step in the process: doing a check using multiple motors.

To make his project work, [Leo] relied on open-source software like Klipper, piecing together code and hardware in a way that made sense to him. In sharing his story, he offers fellow beginners an approachable perspective on robotics, with practical insights and candid reflections on the challenges and breakthroughs.

[Leo]’s project shows that there’s more than one way to start exploring robotics, and that sometimes the best way to learn is simply to dive in and start building. Follow along with his journey as he tackles the complexities of robotics, one step at a time.

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Robot Arm Gives Kids The Roller Coaster Ride Of Their Lives

August 10, 2024 by Dan Maloney 60 Comments

Unfortunately, [Dave Niewinski]’s kids are still too little to go on a real roller coaster. But they’re certainly big enough to be tossed around by this giant robot arm roller coaster simulator.

As to the question of why [Dave] has a Kuka KR 150 robot in his house, we prefer to leave that unasked and move forward. And apparently, this isn’t his first attempt at using the industrial robot as a motion simulator. That attempt revealed a few structural problems with the attachment between the rider’s chair and the robot’s wrist. After redesigning the frame with stouter metal and adding a small form-factor gaming PC and a curved monitor in front of the seat, [Dave] was ready to figure out how to make the arm simulate the motions of a roller coaster.

Now, if you ever thought the world would be a better place if only we had a roller coaster database complete with 4k 60 fps video captured from real coasters, you’re in luck. CoasterStats not only exists, but it also includes six-axis accelerometer data from real rides of coasters across Europe. That gave [Dave] the raw data he needed, but getting it translated into robot motions that simulate the feeling of the ride was a bit tricky. [Dave] goes into the physics of it all in the video below, but suffice it to say that the result is pretty cool.

More after the break.

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A Peek Inside Apple Durability Testing Labs

June 10, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 19 Comments

Apple is well-known for its secrecy, which is understandable given the high stakes in the high-end mobile phone industry. It’s interesting to get a glimpse inside its durability labs and see the equipment and processes it uses to support its IP68 ingress claims, determine drop ability, and perform accelerated wear and tear testing.

Check out these cool custom-built machines on display! They verify designs against a sliding scale of water ingress tests. At the bottom end is IPx4 for a light shower, but basically no pressure. Next up is IPx5, which covers low-pressure ambient-temperature spray jets from all angles – we really liked this machine! Finally, the top-end IPx7 and IPx8 are tested with a literal fire hose blast and a dip in a static pressure tank, simulating a significant depth of water. An Epson robot arm with a custom gripper is programmed to perform a spinning drop onto a hard surface in a repeatable manner. The drop surface is swapped out for each run – anything from a wooden sheet to a slab of asphalt can be tried. High-speed cameras record the motion in enough detail to resolve the vibrations of the titanium shell upon impact!

Accelerated wear and tear testing is carried out using a shake table, which can be adjusted to match the specific frequencies of a car engine or a subway train. Additionally, there’s an interview with the head of Apple’s hardware division discussing the tradeoffs between repairability and durability. He makes some good points that suggest if modern phones are more reliable and have fewer failures, then durability can be prioritized in the design, as long as the battery can still be replaced.

The repairability debate has been raging strong for many years now. Here’s our guide to the responsible use of new technology.

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