scara

26 Articles

Handwriting Robot Arm Is A Little Stiff-wristed

March 27, 2013 by 13 Comments

handwriting-robot

Check out this robot arm capable of handwriting which is orders of magnitude clearer than our own. It was built by [Patrick Barnes] as contract work for a campaign to raise funding for research into Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

Don’t miss the video after the break which starts off with the satisfying whine of some serious stepper motors. Judging scale from this image is a bit tough, but [Patrick] tells us that the entire assembly stands almost fourteen inches tall and the arm has a reach of around twenty inches. The demonstration shows off it’s abilities by drawing a Hilbert Curve. From watching the action you’ll realize that, though this arm and hand look fantastic, this is really a SCARA plotter. The wrist and fingers are for looks only, providing a place where the felt-tipped pen can be mounted (held flush to the paper with a rubber band). Whether that’s a disappointment or not, the precision and look of the machine bring it very high marks. It could take a bit of a lesson in penmanship from another we’ve seen though.

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SCARA Arm Finally Prints Plastic Parts

February 25, 2013 by 24 Comments

SCARA

Here’s a neat alternative to the usual gantry setup you see on 3D printers. [Quentin] designed and build a SCARA arm 3D printer that just saw its first print.

We caught wind of [Quentin]’s SCARA arm a few weeks ago when it was still just a few plastic parts and a glimmer of ambition in its creator’s eye. Most of the parts are 3D printed, including the blue arms for the x and y axes that are driven by stepper motors. The z axis is controlled by two lead screws, and judging by the height of [Quentin]’s machine, he has a pretty big printable volume – at least as large as some of the delta bot 3D printers we’ve seen.

So far [Quentin] has printed a handful of calibration cubes and a wheel with a fairly impressive print resolution. You can check out a video of the SCARA arm printer after the break.

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SCARA Arm 3D Printer

February 8, 2013 by 29 Comments

scara-3d-printer

[Quentin Harley] must really have wanted to test his snuff when it comes to mechanical engineering. He’s been hard at work for a couple of years now designing his own SCARA arm 3D printer. That link leads to a recent summary article in which he shows off the build as seen above. It’s not fully functional yet, but he’s at the point where it’s time to develop the driver circuitry and firmware so he’s close. His blog is dedicated to this single project so click around and see what he went through along the journey.

The SCARA arm is seen in blue, using a couple of stepper motors to move the extruder mount along the x and y axes. The bed itself moves along the Z axis via two precision rods with a threaded rod in the center. As you can see, some of the parts are made of wood, and he used PVC for the cross supports between the upper and lower base platforms. But the majority of the build uses 3D printed parts, including the arms, drive gears, and mounting brackets.

[Thanks Peter]

Building A Pick And Place With 3D Printed Parts

June 28, 2012 by 9 Comments

For the last few months, [HeliumFrog] has been building a SCARA bot to serve as the basis for a pick and place machine. Somewhat amazingly, this is the first robot of its kind to be printed on a 3D printer.

A SCARA-type robot is an articulated arm perfectly suited for transferring components from tubes and reels to a PCB. [HeliumFrog] began his build with an arm with large gears in joints driven by stepper motors and toothed belts. The Z axis was originally driven with a lead screw, but after a thoughtful redesign that was changed over to another toothed belt.

We’ve seen our share of DIY pick and place machines, but most of those have been based on a traditional X/Y Cartesian frame. [HeliumFrog]’s SCARA bot should be – theoretically, at least – faster and more accurate while taking up a smaller footprint in the workshop.

[HeliumFrog] is more or less done with the basics of his build, and is now moving on to building a plastic extrusion tool head for his SCARA bot. Very cool, and should make this robot capable of self-reproduction for under £400 (~$600).

You can check out a video of this articulated arm bot after the break.

Thanks, [Kyle] for sending this one in.

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Salvaged Robot Arm Makes A Big 3d Printer

June 19, 2012 by 34 Comments

Wow, building a precision 3d printer is amazingly easy if you can get your hands on an industrial-quality robot arm. [Dane] wrote in to tell us about this huge extruder printer made from an ’80s-era SCARA robot arm. It is capable of printing objects as large as 25″x12″x6.5″.

This 190 pound beast was acquired during a lab clean out. It was mechanically intact, but missing all of the control hardware. Building controllers was a bit of a challenge since the it’s designed with servo motors and precision feedback sensors. This is different from modern 3d printers which use stepper motors and no feedback sensors. A working controller was built up one component at a time, with a heated bed added to the mix to help prevent warping with large builds. We love the Frankenstein look of the controller hardware, which was mounted hodge-podge as each new module was brought online.

You can see some printing action in the clip after the break. A Linux box takes a design and spits out control instructions to the hardware.

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