Maplin robot arm arduino nano

Every time the clutch clicks, the grip is released slightly and then reapplied. That momentary release is often enough to drop the object. Regarding the batteries in the base.

Removing two of the batteries would not be a good idea unless you replaced them with similar weights. The extra two batteries can also form a useful spare set to switch to when the first two are run down. The Pi does not have any ADC inputs but with suitable interface devices it can have sufficient. Neil Perhaps the idea of a pressure sensitive resistor would work for the gripper, what do you think?

Yes, I figured this out when I saw a video of a guy building the manual version. For the grip, perhaps simplest is best? A quick scan of the various YouTube videos of this arm shows that all sorts of position sensors and switches have been schemed out and tested in recent years. To my mind, they all add too much weight and complexity to each axis and require a plethora of extra wires, plugs and interfaces for them to function. The most attractive qualities of this little arm are its ubiquity, cheap price, cross-platform simplicity USB and single-cable plug-and-go functionality.

Whatever sensors or position aids are added, a main aim should be to retain as many of those qualities as possible. Some kind of pressure sensor does seem an obvious area to look at. It would need to be simple and cheap though.

Any of the attempts done using two sheets of foil separated by a bit of foam as the sensor? Measure the capacitance change as the foam is compressed and the gap between the foils decreases. Reply To post replies, please first log in. Help ROOL make things happen — please consider donating!

A fast and easily customised operating system for ARM devices. Nov 24, 9: Nov 24, 4: Nov 24, 5: Nov 30, 9: Dec 1, Dec 7, Dec 26, 7: Dec 27, 9: Dec 28, 9: Dec 28, Dec 29, Dec 29, 3: Dec 29, 4: Dec 29, 5: Dec 29, 9: Dec 30, 1: Dec 30, Dec 31, Jan 1, Jan 1, 4: Jan 1, 5: Social Follow us on and. REM Sets fastest key repeat rate. Good to see an update to this, Neil. Hi Neil, There is a small bug. That's a lot of robotic hands to shake!

Mime describes MeArm Pi as "easy to assemble and not requiring extensive knowledge of electronics, the MeArm Pi STEM kit helps kids and adults learn robotics and teaches them how to code.

I briefly interviewed Ben Pirt joint founder of Mime. His passion for the new MeArm is clear: So we decided to look at which parts of the build were particularly difficult. The number of screws came out as a big issue that was catching people out so we tried to re-work the design wherever possible not to need screws.

Now the only screws left are on the joints where two pieces hinge together. The grip had a major re-work from 9 screws down to 1 which made it much simpler to build.

When I received the Maplin robot arm for Christmas a few years back I spent several hours putting together gear boxes, ensuring all was aligned and assembling the thing. While highly enjoyable in its own way who doesn't like to build things it was also frustrating: Mime's keen attempt to solve this build complexity problem is admirable.

Once I had built the Maplin arm I wanted to program it using a record and playback mechanism in Python. It was at this point I hit a few snags as precision playback just isn't easily possible with normal motors, and again it looks like MeArm Pi has overcome this issue. How accurate are the servos with MeArm Pi, i.

The big difference from the Maplin arm is that servos can be relied upon to be nicely repeatable so you can program them to do things again and again. Don't get me wrong: I love the Maplin arm and easily recommend it to everyone as a low-cost way to get into robotics on the Raspberry Pi. Now though, Mime are offering a viable alternative that combines the hardware with ease of programming.

Talking of programming, I asked Ben what else makes the MeArm so great: Software for the Maplin arm does exist: Ben also tells me that the age range of the arm is " officially It seems that MeArm Pi is not the only product that Mime are looking at for the future too: MeArm Pi, available for another 6 days on Kickstarter. Last Saturday I had a great time at Bristol's Digimakers. I regularly attend this superb event, running a stand and get the opportunity to talk computers and science with children, parents and teachers.

Several organisations and lots of students ran demonstrations, workshops and drop-in help sessions throughout the day. This is something especially neat about Digimakers: We had Raspberry Pi, Arduino, custom things that I don't quite understand and more besides all used as the basis for a number of very interesting projects. The computer science and engineering students from the University of Bristol continue to impress. Anthony really hit the nail with his sound wave generator which produced a fantastic musical accompaniment for the day when hooked up to Apple's Logic Pro X.

If you're reading this and looking to hire an audio engineer then he definitely deserves the job! Directly opposite was Matthew Hockley with a swarm of cute robots that were running a simple algorithm related to locality of their neighbours triggering different light patterns.

We talked about how us fallible humans like to anthropomorphise whenever given a chance to do so and I postulated that the random movement of his swarm would be seen as "good" or "evil" if he put green smiley faces or red angry faces on top of each robot. Matthew agreed that we do tend to read more into such critters than is deserved as they're not really responsible agents an update to the Three Laws that were just a plot device for Asimov and not something to base a real robot on as Alan Winfield notes in his excellent, accessible book, Robotics: A Very Short Introduction.

They appear to be benign, but if you look closely you can see them plotting world domination. Students and a teacher from Cotham School were back with their arcade cabinet, and this time also had two "Mini Me" versions as I like to think of them present.

Sadly I forgot to get a photo, but these proved extremely popular. I think the brief goes along the lines of: They believe absolutely that teaching software is not enough and that kids should be getting hands on experience of electronics. However I never learnt electronics in school and feel very much I'm enormously behind the learning curve here.

Although I've built my own circuits, read lots of tutorials in books and The MagPi magazine and bought and experimented with stacks of components it all does feel very unstructured, as though I am missing the fundamental underpinnings that school ought to have taught me. There is a huge benefit to learning things when your brain is still wired to absorb knowledge like a sponge. At Digimakers they brought along an electronics project kit called MicroBox to get those brain cells firing and this proved very popular.

Ok, so what has all this to do with the title of this post? One of the workshops focussed on Quantum Computing for kids yes, you did read that right! While I unfortunately was unable to get away from my stand for long enough to listen in I had a wonderful conversation with a 14 year old girl who popped over afterwards. It started in just the way you don't expect a conversation with a teenager to start: This was the highlight of the day for me.

The next Digimakers is on October 29th at At-Bristol. If you are planning on attending you should register in advance as this event is very popular. Digimakers , george , zumo , robot , bdd , LCD Comments. I spent yesterday at Bristol Digimakers having a fantastic time meeting lots of young people who had come along to the event to learn more about coding, robotics, Minecraft, robotics and robotics.

There was definitely a theme going on. Digimakers has grown to be the place go to get hands-on experience of hacking and making.

Backed by University of Bristol kudos to the ever-energetic Caroline who does a great deal of the organising and supported by a host of students and other individuals running their latest coding and hardware inventions a great vibe could be felt all day long. Cartmanzilla towers over the city.

The little robots wonder how they will escape. The aim of my table was to present two concepts: Event Storming rather than a list of functional requirements a left to right approach that may not lead to the desired outcome allows non-technical people to be more involved in the creation of the robots that they will share their environment with.

Distilling the essence of BDD conversations that discover outcomes of value that enable us to write tests that drive code down to something that is easily digestible by youngsters proved challenging, but in general most seemed to understand. I think this was helped by having a working demonstration: Zumo George was given the behaviour of "don't get caught by Cartmanzilla" which in practical terms meant using his inbuilt IR sensor to retreat from Cartmanzilla when he approached, and to advance when Cartmanzilla retreated all over the top of a lovely cityscape given to me by the great Tim Cox.

Secondly, I wanted to explore the idea of how prey avoids predators and how predators catch prey by looking at three different robots: Crazy Robot just moves randomly and cannot react objectively to external stimulus it can however sometimes bounce off things it bumps into Hexbug Ant has bump sensors front and rear and therefore can run away from anything it touches.

Zumo George can sort-of see via his infrared sensor what is in front and respond accordingly. After playing with Cartmanzilla and the robots I asked two questions of the youngsters who came to my table: If you were a mouse escaping from a cat which method random, touch, sight would you use to keep away from the cat? If you were a cat trying to catch a mouse which method would you use? For the first question everyone said sight, which is the obvious answer, as assuming that there is enough light for the mouse to see then this keeps a decent distance between it and the claws.

For the second I was genuinely surprised that about a third of the students realised the cat would likely use a combination of sight and touch. Cats do just this: To help reinforce this point I played a snippet from a BBC documentary that covers exactly this: Watch the whole video or skip forward to 2m15s where they explain why and show a cat doing this.

As the cat gets very close to the mouse it can no longer focus so it uses its whiskers to guide the prey to its mouth. If you have a pet cat you can likely see this in action: When the cat thinks about pouncing, but then gives up you can often it's quick see its whiskers twitch: It is harder to see if the cat does pounce as this happens in the blink of an eye.

The interesting thing here is that my robot, Zumo George would benefit from exactly this kind of whisker technology. This can be seen on the data sheet for the sensor in the graph on page four, which I have reproduced below. This graph shows the voltage returned on the analog pin for a given distance. Below about cm the output voltage becomes wildly inaccurate. This is the point at which George's vision blurs resulting in him sometimes advancing and sometimes retreating, seemingly at random: