First steps to a complete robot arm
The oomlaut open source robot arm base assembled easily and looks slick and professional.
Thanks to Riley, I am the proud owner of a pile of lasercut parts for the uber-cool oomlaut open source robot arm. The details can be had from both the original blog post and a thingiverse.com post that has the necessary design files (nicely laid out for the lasercutter, although Riley was able to get the layout down to a single 12×24in sheet, which was great. He said he will upload it as a derivative on thingiverse ASAP, so others can benefit, too.) My daughter and I both thought watching it cut was the coolest thing ever. She has taken all the scrap and has it proudly displayed in her room, too. It helps that the color we chose was bright red- gives it a gem-like (and somewhat sinister!) appearance. Can’t beat that!
I have most of the electronics already- I will be using a barebones Arduino as the controller, and a Pololu servo interface board to maximize the precision. I did have to order some good metal-gear servos, which I got for a steal at dealextreme.com The total cost of the project will be about 70$US, and if I had to buy everything fresh, closer to 100$US. Pretty good for a flexible robot arm and experimental hacking platform. My intent is to incorporate it into some work that colleagues and I have been doing around automated lab testing. I intend to borrow an existing reverse kinetics framework and use that for path planning. I am also going to rework the gripper, as I think it is the weakest part of the design.
Next up will be an illustrated build diary, here on the Synthetos blog, and a compete set of instructions, ordering guide, etc., over at Instructables. The goal is to get the arm built and tested, and to validate the design, as well as get others interested in building their own. Who knows- if it works out well, I may even take a crack at a derivative design that can be built using only RepRap-ed parts!
