I finally completed a video of my custom robot arm controller last night. The input arm was built using aluminum bars bent to shape. Each shape matches the dimensions of the robot arm for a 1:1 movement effect (needs some tweaking).
With the custom joystick the arm is very easy to control. See a short video of the arm in operation here: youtube.com/watch?v=zZwnyZPkylk
The input arm on the left shows up as a standard windows joystick. The signals from the JS are fed into a piece of software that inverts or scales the movements as needed and then sends the proper signals to a servo controller on the arm.
I will have a tutorial on how to create your own custom up soon. Thanks for looking.
Really cool! Nice custom joystick you’ve build!! The movement from the joystick are very need converted to smooth movements in the robotic arm! Thanks for sharing! 5 starts on youtube
You’ve inspired me to try something I’ve been wanting to do. I took a plain old 422 servo (311 would work too) and removed the control board. I soldered the two motor leads together and soldered the servo wire to the pot. Servo to Pot, yellow to yellow, red to red, and black to green. When you plug this into an analog input it gives you a nice 0 to 5vdc to the input when you move the servos output shaft. The reason I soldered the motor leads together is it provides friction and holding power to the servo. So I tested it using this simple program for the basic atom 28 for IDE 2.2.1.1.
[code]servo1 var word
sound 9, [100\880, 100\988, 100\1046, 100\1175]
low 0
Instead of using the pot in the servo, couldn’t you just use a linear 0-5k pot, with the pot input being supplied 5v from the board, wiper connected to the board analog input, and output connected to ground?
Hey Jim thats very cool. It reminds me of what another guy is doing with his robot called BrainBot. I have always wondered though, can a standard servo can successfully be modified to provide feedback while still functional?
In the past I’ve tinkered with gamepad/joystick gizmos like below to provide an inexpensive way to input analog data into the computer via windows gameport. It would be interesting to see if the chip used in the bottom joypad has unused analog inputs.
Yes of course. But what I’m describing here is an easy way to make an animatronic teach pendant that looks exactly like the bot being controlled. The pro chip has 8 analog inputs so a BRAT or arm would be easy to implement.
Yes it will work with a 475, but it’s more expensive then the 422…