Apr. 14, 2015 | By Simon
It seems that robots have been getting a lot of attention these days with everything from Hollywood feature films to theories about the future of AI intelligence, however the process of building a robot from scratch is nowhere near as easy or as quick as it’s depicted in some of these Hollywood films - unless of course you’re starting with a pre-built kit such as one from LEGO NXT.
For many who are able to 3D print their own parts, creating a robot isn’t actually as daunting of a task as it would appear, and starting with building a robot arm is actually a great place to start - such as this 3D Printed Robot Arm project that has been shared by Instructables user ‘Beaconsfield’.
The arm, which is made almost entirely out of 3D printed parts that snap together, features three servo-controlled joints plus a rotating base and gripper. The arm is controlled by a series of buttons that are connected to an Arduino Uno that is hidden within the housing. As for wiring, a simple circuit layout makes connecting all of the components a cinch.
There are roughly a dozen different supplies needed to create the robotic arm and include servos, push buttons, a power switch, a potentiometer, LEDs, a circuit board and Ohm resistors, among other supplies - all of which are available and able to order easily online over at Radioshack.
For this project in particular, an Afinia 3D printer was used, however any 3D printer should work just fine as the necessary STL files are included and are scalable. As-is however, the arm is roughly 20 inches long and takes a considerable amount of time and material to print. When the Afinia 3D printer was used to create this project, some of the parts were able to be printed at the same time so that is worth looking into depending on which 3D printer you are using.
In total, the estimated print time for the entire robot arm assembly when using the Afinia 3D printer was just over 32 hours at a resolution of .25mm with a hollow fill for all parts. The entire process used 842.8 grams of filament.
Once the parts were all printed, the rest of the assembly came down to assembling each of the robot joints and wiring up the necessary electronic components using the Arduino Uno, the servos, the resistors and the other components necessary for being able to control the final robotic arm design.
However, make sure you’re on the lookout for a random, flying robot arm at this stage.
“Test the code at this point - be careful, the arm will "jump" awake and might hit something (aka you), says Beaconsfield.”
“Check that the servos move in the right directions when you push the buttons. If necessary, update the code to reflect how you assembled the arm (some button/servo relationships may need to be reversed - just swap the button numbers in the if statements).”
Finally, once the arm has been assembled, it is ready to be attached to the base and ultimately, the pre-wired control panel and switchboard. Since there are six servos, the arm pulls a substantial amount of current so a reliable power supply is needed when using the arm for longer durations of time.
As for what to do with the arm - whatever satisfies your imagination? Among other things, the arm is capable of being customized with different gripper designs or can even have its code changed to perform any number of automated tasks.
For the build instructions in-full, head over to Instructables.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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