We have recently purchased a WLkata Mirobot arm through RobotShop. It arrived, and worked well from the start (except the DOA servo-motor gripper, but that’s another story).
I was able to use both Blockly and Python inside the WLkata Studio w/o problems. The only issue was that their library is asynchronous, so you can’t know what your arm is doing well enough to coordinate it with other machines (our requirement). Since the Studio Python environment is based on the WLkata Python library, the same is true for stand-alone Python code based on that library.
So I found the mirobot-py library on github (https://github.com/rirze/mirobot-py - highly recommended), and with a little bit of hacking (write to me if you need help), I was able to get the arm to do what we need it to do.
Now, I’m on to the next step - coordinating its activity with other machines. To do that, I would like to take advantage of the I/O pins on the Mirobot controller box. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any reliable documentation on how to use them. They are mentioned in the Mirobot documentation and are shown in the pictures.
I found this reference in what appears to be an older version of the doc: Documentation | WLKATA Book Shelf . But the commands described in that table (ex. O130,2,2,0,0) only produce a “wrong format” error message.
And there doesn’t seem to be any information on how to use them from Python.
Hello brt 288
I am running into the exact same problem as I have the mirobot and am currently trying to integrate it into a piece of inspection equipment. I have contacted Wlkata about it because they have a video of their arm doing a toy fruit sorting with an external start stop button and they were no help. I was wondering if you had come to any solution to this. I have only been working on this for a few weeks but I see you were in the same boat as me.
Hi engbullie,
The solution ended up being a complete upgrade of all software, including all firmware. Took a few tries, but the China team was very helpful, once I got to them. They set up a private chat room, and walked me through the process. I would highly recommend doing same.
Please let me know if you still need help, and I’ll dig up the details.
Ben
