NoSomos:: Projects

Yeah baby! The servos finally arrived, so I worked out the first prototype of the robotic arm, that you can see in the following pictures:

As you can see it features three servos (they are quite small and do work reasonably well) that are joined together with small tubes made of aluminium and carbon fiber (they are, in fact, pieces of broken arrows). I thought about using icecream sticks or something like that, but found those little tubes that do the job and look cool :-)

This prototype has a lot (not really a lot but some) duct tape, but all great prototypes use it. I plan replacing it later, but for now it just works.

In the picture above you can see how the servos are placed: Servos 1 and 2 make the shoulder, with servo 1 pointing backwards and servo 2 pointing to the outside of the "body". They allow the arm to be turned up and out. Meanwhile, servo 3 is the elbow, and do what elbows do.

Servo 1 moves all the weight of the arm, so it should be the first one being replaced as the arm grows and takes heavier loads (or any load at all).

In the top view you get the idea of how it is all arranged. You can see that I have used two tubes for the upper section of the arm, while only one for the lower section, only one tube between servos 1 and 2, that I will eventualy cut shorter:

And yes... It moves!! I even wrote a simple program to send commands through the usb port of the computer, and a not so simple program to make all this using a graphical interface...

More to come, stay tuned!