Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Armstrong the Robot Arm

After many failures, breaking wood, melting wires, and other disasters, I finally have a somewhat working robot arm. Built from balsa wood like his brother Woodrow, Armstrong uses 6 servo motors providing 4 degrees of freedom. He has a shoulder, elbow, wrist, and claws. Many of my failures were due to making his arm too long for the shoulder servo to support the weight and also using thin wood that cracked too easily. Even now, this working model feels like it could give up on me at any moment. I think the shoulder servo just isn't strong enough to properly support the weight of 4 other servos using the lengths of wood I used. But, nonetheless, he is working for now and it's been a long time since I've made an update here so I decided it's time for a video. In the future, I may consider rebuilding him, making his arms even shorter and providing more room to hide the electrical components so he doesn't look so messy.

**UPDATE**
I have uploaded the code for those who are interested in this project. The usual disclaimer is applied here, all of my arduino code is quite messy :)
Download link