servo motor

26 Articles

Smooth stepper motor robot arm

Stepper Motor Robot Arm Has Smooth Moves

January 22, 2018 by 17 Comments

[Tobias Kuhn] had watched a YouTube video about a robot arm which used servo motors, and wanted to try making one himself. But he found it hard to get slow or smooth movements out of the servos. Even removing the microcontroller and trying to work with the servo’s driver-IC and potentiometer from an Arduino Nano didn’t get him satisfaction.

Then he found the very affordable 28BYJ-48 stepper motor. After some experimenting, he came up with a smooth moving robot arm with four steppers controlled from an Arduino Mega and A4988 stepper motor drivers. Rather than write a bunch of stepper motor code himself, he installed and ran a four-axis fork of grbl on the Arduino, turning it into a stepper motor controller. One minor hitch was that the A4988 motor drivers are for bipolar stepper motors but 28BYJ-48 steppers are unipolar. Luckily he knew of a very simple hack which our [Brian Benchoff] wrote about for turning a unipolar motor into a bipolar motor.

To tell the robot arm what to do, he built a replica arm with potentiometers in place of the stepper motors. As he manipulates the replica, the values of the potentiometers are read by a Raspberry Pi and some custom Python code which sends the appropriate G-code to the Arduino/grbl controlled robot arm. There’s a bit of a lag but when he moves the replica arm, the robot arm does the same move. See it in action in the video below.

Continue reading “Stepper Motor Robot Arm Has Smooth Moves” →

Robot Hand Goes Wireless

March 13, 2017 by 7 Comments

We can’t decide if [MertArduino’s] robotic hand project is more art or demonstration project. The construction using springs, fishing line, and servo motors isn’t going to give you a practical hand that could grip or manipulate anything significant. However, the project shows off a lot of interesting construction techniques and is a fun demonstration for using nRF24L01 wireless in a project. You can see a video of the contraption, below.

A glove uses homemade flex sensors to send wireless commands to the hand. Another Arduino drives an array of servo motors that make the fingers flex. You don’t get fine control, nor any real grip strength, but the hand more or less will duplicate your movements. We noticed one finger seemed poorly controlled, but we suspect that was one of the homemade flex sensors going rouge.

Continue reading “Robot Hand Goes Wireless” →

The Cicada: A Parasite Art Piece With Commitment Issues

September 19, 2016 by 18 Comments

How often do you think deeply about the products around you? How about those you owned five years ago? Ten? The Cicada — brainchild of [Daniel Kerris] — is an art piece that aims to have the observer reflect on consumer culture, buyer’s remorse, and wanting what we cannot have.

The Cicada consists of an ultrasonic sensor feeding data to a Raspberry pi which — calculating the distance of an approaching human — either speeds up or slows down a servo motor connected to a General Electric Walkman’s cassette speed potentiometer. Upon detecting someone approaching, The Cicada begins to loop the chorus of Celine Dion’s “I Will Always Love You”. As you move closer, the tape speed slows, and there is a transition from love at first sight to nightmarish drawl as the music slows.

Continue reading “The Cicada: A Parasite Art Piece With Commitment Issues” →

Robotic Arm From Cardboard

September 14, 2016 by 7 Comments

Google showed the world that you could make a virtual reality headset from cardboard. We figure that might have been [Uladz] inspiration for creating a robotic arm also made out of cardboard. He says you can reproduce his design in about two hours.

You’ll need an Arduino and four hobby servo motors. The cardboard doesn’t weigh much, so you could probably use fairly small motors. In addition to the cardboard, there’s a piece of hardboard for the base and a few metal clips. You can control it all from the Arduino program or add an IR receiver if you want to run it by remote control. There’s a video of the arm–called CARDBIRD–in action, below.

Continue reading “Robotic Arm From Cardboard” →

X-Ray Everything!

May 9, 2016 by 24 Comments

We’re not 100% sure why this is being done, but we’re 110% happy that it is. Someone (under the name of [The X-Ray Playground]) is putting interesting devices under an X-ray camera and posting videos of them up on YouTube. And he or she seems to be adding a few new videos per day.

Want to see the inner workings of a pneumatic microswitch? Or is a running pair of servo motors more your speed? Now you know where to look. After watching the servo video, we couldn’t help but wish that a bunch of the previous videos were also taken while the devices were being activated. The ball bearing wouldn’t gain much from that treatment, but the miniature piston certainly would. [X-Ray Playground], if you’re out there, more working demos, please!

How long the pace of new videos can last is anyone’s guess, but we’re content to enjoy the ride. And it’s just cool to see stuff in X-ray. If we had a postal address, we know we’d ship some stuff over to be put under the lens.

We don’t have as many X-ray hacks as you’d expect, which is probably OK given the radioactivity and all. But we have seen [MikesElectricStuff] taking apart a baggage-scanner X-ray machine in exquisite detail, and a DIY fluoroscope (yikes!), so we’re not strangers. Who needs Superman? We all have X-ray vision these days.

Thanks [OiD] for the tip!

Is It A Stepper? Or Is It A Servo?

April 30, 2016 by 37 Comments

Almost everyone who is involved with 3D printing thinks to themselves at some point, “this could all be done using a closed-loop system and DC motors”. Or at least everyone we know. There’s even one commercial printer out there that uses servo control, but because of this it’s not compatible with the rest of the (stepper-motor driven) DIY ecosystem.

[LoboCNC] wanted to change this, and he’s in a unique position to do so, having previously built up a business selling PIC-based servo controllers. His “servololu” is essentially a microcontroller and DC motor driver, with an input for a quadrature encoder for feedback. The micro takes standard step/direction input like you would use to drive a stepper motor, and then servos the attached DC motor to the right position. It even signals when it has an error.
Continue reading “Is It A Stepper? Or Is It A Servo?” →

Office Supplies Hexapod Tramples Your Excuses

April 2, 2016 by 8 Comments

We all have reasons why we’re not building cool robots. “I don’t have a lasercutter.” “I don’t have a 3D printer.” [JAC_101]’s hexapod robot dances all over your excuses with its tongue-depressor body and pencil-eraser feet!

Some folks like to agonize over designs, optimizing this and tweaking that on the blackboard. Other folks just build stuff and see what works. If you’re in the mood for some of the latter, check out some of the techniques at work here. Tongue depressors make a simple frame, and servos are lashed on with zip ties in place of fancy servo mounts (or hot glue). Photoresistors are soldered directly to their load resistors, making a simple light sensor. It’s all very accessible and brutally minimalistic, but it seems to walk. (Check out the video, below.)

Arduino code is available for you to play with, naturally.

Continue reading “Office Supplies Hexapod Tramples Your Excuses” →