Selfmade 5 DOF Manipulator

Hello world!

This is my very first robotic project. I made a 5 degrees of freedom manipulator arm completely from scratch. First thing i want to say is that this guy with his project was my inspiration for doing this: https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/18504. To be honest (and as everyone can see ;) i copied much from his design. Thank you very much for your great work! And i'm very sad we can't buy the supermodified boards anymore, because my plan was to use them for my robot ):

I documented the whole building process because i really miss more detailed information on some other robot projects (including the above one) and maybe others are interested in more details too, so i will provide as much as i can. I also share my models, plans and complete sourcecode for the microcontroller and control application. You are free to use, change or do whatever you want with it. Ok so lets start with some information about the project: Nearly all parts of the robot are made out of polystyrene sheets (0.5 - 2mm). It is moved by 6 servos connected to a Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller (hidden inside the arm) and controlled by an Arduino Uno rev.3, which is used for the main logic and connection to the control software (written in java). There are 2 FSR-400 in the gripper for measuring the pressure and to avoid stressing the gripper servos too much.

I first designed the whole thing in Google Sketchup. I like this software because its so easy to use and good for quick results. Then i sketched the parts with a pencil on polystyrene sheets and cut them out with a cutter knife. I used little files and sanding paper to make the parts look nice. And at the end they got glued together with special polystyrene glue.

The circuit is built like an arduino shield on a breadboard that can stack on top of the arduino board.

More details, sources and what is planned comes soon...

UPDATE 23.05.12:

By request, i uploaded the complete sourcecode of the control application (eclipse java project), arduino sketch and my google sketchup model. Because i stopped to work on this project right after my first post here, the code is still highly experimental, incomplete and i'm not even sure everything works in its current state (; I'm sorry there's no stable release. Please note that you need the modified version of arduinos SoftwareSerial library (because of a bug in the original one) to get arduino to work with the pololu micro serial servo controller. I named my modified version SoftwareSerialPololu and uploaded it under arduino-1.0/libraries/SoftwareSerialPololu, thats the path you have to put it under your arduino installation before you can use my code.

I hope it's helpful for someone anyway! Feel free to use and modify it as you like.

Here's the link: https://code.google.com/p/robotic-arm-control/

Maybe i will work on this project again next winter... (;

But for now, pictures say more than a thousand words (;

And here are plenty of them: