It was never going to be strong enough as a robot arm, so they turned it around and made it into an interface device. The amount of room needed for the linkages to move around is not practical.
On the plus side, it’s got a lot of the hardware that robots use and may serve as a great education for people starting out in the field: encoders, position sensors, DC brushless motors, control, and more.
Makes life easier by cleaning up all those messy wires in your prototyping. hanging off the side makes it easy to fit in a two part, 3D printed case. We use it as part of development for our Sixi Robot Arm.
You can get all the details and order them for you or a friend right now.
From any web-enabled desktop browser you can experiment with the kinematics of a robot arm at http://robot.glumb.de/
The author, Maximilian Beck, has made all the code available online at https://github.com/glumb/robot-gui. Be sure to check out his other interesting projects on github, too.
New calibrator: put it between the pen holder and the paper, insert your pen until it hits the calibrator, tighten the screw, and voila. Perfect every time, no guesswork.
New experimental bearing holders: holds one roller skate bearing (8x22x7mm) against the belt and the pulley on each corner of the machine to prevent skipping during high acceleration moves.
New downward tilting pen: A small downward tilt improves the life of the pen and the amount of ink that flows. Great for drawings over 2h.
Better fitting parts: the arms on your pen holder should move freely. We often had to sand and prep to make them work great. We’ve tweaked the parts to just work.
