Hi, firstly I’ll introduce myself as it’s my first topic on this board. I’m Krzysiek and I’m from Poland ;], so… I’d like to build Lynx6 arm, but I can’t afford to buy it because it’s too expensive for me, but if i had some plants of every single part of this arm, I could make it myself. So maybe do you have such plans?
P.S.
If I made some mistakes, please correct me.
See U.
Or maybe do you have some CAD images of Lynx6 parts?
Hi,
at the beginning I have to tell you that building Lynx6 arm is not so easy as it may looks like at first sight. The only way is if you know somebody who owns laser cutter or maybe a CNC milling machine. I am not saying that otherwise it is not possible to make such a robot arm, but not as accurate and not as fancy as original Lynx6 arm. The second thing is cost. Even if you make plastic parts at home you probably(if you don’t have them) have to buy seven servo motors and servo controller which would cost you in total around 170€. I am trying to tell you that such a robot arm isn’t cheap toy. Even if you make it by yourself you have to put some money in it. I am not English native speaker, but I hope that it is possible to understand what I am trying to emphasize.
This summer I made such an arm and it took me almost two weeks to build it. It look like quite nice, although I prefer aluminum version. As soon as I get some light 2mm aluminum plates I will make another one. I have very accurate drawings of every single part in CorelDRAW, but I can not send to you, because that is not fair to Lynxmotion staff. 
If you familiar with AutoCAD I am sure that it will not take you more than a weekend to redraw all parts from the pictures found on the web page. I did all drawings in four days.
You can see my generic Lynx6 arm below. I will post some more pictures when I get home(in the next few days).
www3.shrani.si/thumbs/robot960062.jpg
Regards, Crt
That does look nice. 
I remember the first arm I made from scratch. It was made from fiberglass (PC board material). It took a long time… But I remember the great feeling of acomplishment I had the first time it moved on it’s own.
I found this image of the first robot arm I made about 20 some odd years ago. The Armatron had only one motor, and it was running the whole time you used the arm, even if it was not moving… I opened the arm and removed all of the gears in the base of the robot, and added separate motors for eaxh axis. It took a LONG time! It was connected to a home brew motor controller (relays) that I made from a prototype expansion board for my RS Color Computer! I wrote a simple sequencer program in basic and it actually kind of sort of worked… Well not really, it really sucked because there was no feedback. You had to turn on the motors for a certain amount of time, and cross your fingers hoping the robot would go to the correct place. Not to mention the fact that moving one axis would effect all the others down stream. Well it was a fun learning experience. The younger folks sometimes don’t realize how easy it is nowadays to build bots. 
Wow, the birth of Lynxmotion…
I always wanted to buy that arm when I was kid but never did. You are right, today is a lot easier to build a robot that can work like a real robot.
I’ve got an unaltered Armatron in the collection of my life’s stuff. When the Heathkit Hero came out – it had an arm option – I built one for a friend who thought she could just plug some boards into a chassis and turn it on. When she opened the box – 
Now that was a construction project!. It worked perfectly from the first power on. I traded the time for an XT clone at cost. Gad! I still have that computer and it still works – once the 20 MB hard drive warms up. 
My first homebrew bot arm was never finished. It was to be more of a controlled crane type — hmmm…I should dust that off and look at it again (staring at nothing thinking of what could be).
Yep, I always wanted to get into robotics when I was younger, but never did until recently and I am having lots of fun! My Masters project was a computer vision and pattern recognition system done on a Franklin Ace. Needless to say that was a few years ago!
I know it was a long time ago, and I’m not sure sure a machine could do much in terms of video recognition. If I remember correctly, an Ace is on par with an 8086 or more correctly a clone of an Apple II. However, considering a number of us are really interested in adding vision to our bots, I was wondering if you’d share how far you got.
Disclaimer: I learned how to program on an 8088, and used an Apple II (with a whopping 10MB hard drive) back in the day.
Yep, this was done in 6502 assembly language. I was able to use a camera to read in an image and do edge detection and the like. The goal was to be able to take a picture of a circuit board and create a schematic from it. I was able to make it work well enough to satisfy the project review for my masters.
However by todays standards it was very primitive. For example the CMU Camera system is much more advanced than what I did some twenty some years ago!
