Have been lurking here for a few days and have to say really cool stuff.
I have a project at work that could possibly use 2 or 3 of these arms. just not sure they would be up to the challange. I am plant manager at a laser processing facility and have a welding project in the works. The parts are about 2oz’s in weight. The arms would be used for loading the fixture, then unloading the welding fixture and placing the part in a pressure testing fixture. The last arm would unload the pressure tested part and drop the part in a bin. This application would be 500,000 parts a year. I need an honest opinion of trying to use these arms in an industrial application.
in the specs they say that the arm can lift a 3 oz part in extension.
I dont quite understand… will they solder?? I guest not. They pick up a 2oz object at each seconde about?!? I was going to tell you that you could change the servos to a more powerfull type, but I think that would be pretty useless. Uselly you can’t use servos for more than 30 minutes before the heat up, I think that’s it but I’m noit quite sure…
So, if you want your robotic arms work year long 24 hours a day I think it’s not a good choice, just because of the time use of servos before they heat up. The best would be to go with a hydraulic arm I think. Correct me if I’m wrong.
To describe it better the arms would only be on and off of fixtures. There will be a camco indexer with 4 welding stations. 1 arm would load a part, 1 would unload and load the pressure tester, and the last would unload the tester. the laser does the welding. The bots are just workers.
It is just an idea. I accidently found this site. After seeing the videos the idea lights came on. I showed them to my boss and told him I was going to build one to play with. He lit-up like a christmas tree after seeing the vids.
The cost of the arm is minimal, I wonder if upgraded servos would make it possible???
One way or another I’ll be building one on a Hex to play with anyways…
If I were going to take on a light industrial application I would build the arm from the servo erector set. All aluminum construction and ball bearings on every joint. I would use HS-5955 servos as they are very strong and have heatsinks to keep them from heating up. All of the software and tutorials on the website for the L5 and L6 arms will work for the aluminum arm. The weak link in these hobby servos are the potentiometers. This is a variable resistor used by the servos electronics to read the position of the final gear. No one really has an answer to the question of (MTBF) mean time before failure. It could be tens of thousands of cycles or hundreds of thousands, we just don’t know… That’s the honest answer. If you take this on, please let us know how it goes. Just a few years ago I would not even recommend it, but these new servos are very impressive, and the SES is definetely up to the task as far as the hardware is concerned. Hope this helps.
Thanks Jim, I wanted to hear that. I think that the way we will go is to purchase a L6 so I am able to learn (play… hehe) the programming end. Then also we can see in a short test run basic capabilities and programming issues. This isn’t really a new concept for us, we have designed and built some really big basic bots for similar purposes. Those beasts were for 100lbs parts and were run with ano2000 controllers. Just CNC bots.
To give a bit of background we are a 3d laser processing facility. We have 1 3axis machine and 7 6-7 axis machines on the floor. 2000 watts is our biggest machine our smallest is 900w. All Co2 although I’m looking into a yag marker. I can honestly say I like my job as I get to play with about anything that comes to mind whenever I want. It’s the best way to learn.
Finally got the parts in for sample welding today. Of course the whole routine has changed, we now also have to pressfit them together. Still another possibility for a arm application. The actual weight of the parts is 1.075 oz., they are 1.91" tall when assebled. The photos here show the unassembled part, welded, and one that we tested in a press that broke at 1400 psi. Notice the material tore, not the weld. The photos are so you can see the actual product that I want to use arms for in the production process.
Tomorrow, I’ll get a video of a sample weld for anyone that hasn’t seen laser welding.
