Dec 06, 2017
Gerardo Ramos
So there has been a halt to the progress of the Autonomous Rover. So I decided to do a quick simple project. I already wanted to work on this project but the printer is down so I can't 3D print anything at the moment. So I went ahead and used cardboard pieces to make parts of this simple robotic arm. I started off by first just cutting out pieces of the cardboard where I would mount the servos onto.
I had already designed these simple parts in solidworks, so I decided to just follow the dimensions of the parts that I made in solidworks. The parts that I made out of cardboard weren't accurately measured since this is basically a mock up. A proof of concept.
Once I had all the parts cut out, I attached the servos to the parts. For the part where you see two servos in one arm, the servos just simply fit in perfectly. For the base, I attached the servo horn to the cardboard using hot glue. Then with a rubberband, I attached this same servo to the first arm.I hot glued the small part at the end of the arm onto the servo horn.
What controlled the servos were three potentiometers The Arduino reads the analog readings from the potentiometers and then converts it to a position in degrees for the servos. The bottom two pictures show the electronics of the project and the entire project itself. I basically just used the Arduino's example under Servo named "Knob". I just incorporated two more servos and potentiometers to complete the code for this robotic arm. A video of this arm can be seen at the top of this post.
If you have any questions about this simple project, just drop a comment. I hope for the GPS and the ArduPilot to come soon now so I can start making progress on the Autonomous Robot. Well thanks for reading guys and checking this post out.