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We all know how annoying a ceiling fan can be when it isn’t balanced well and that annoyance perfectly demonstrates the necessity of a good, sturdy bearing. A ceiling fan’s bearing needs to allow for smooth rotational motion with as little friction as possible, while completely constraining movement in every other axis. Those properties make a ceiling base a surprisingly good starting point for a SCARA, as demonstrated in tuenhidiy’s recent Instructables write-up.

In their tutorial, tuenhidiy refers to this as a “Spaceship Scara Arm.” It isn’t exactly clear why they chose the “spaceship” terminology, but it is similar to a conventional SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm) — just one with only two degrees of freedom (DOF).

The entire point of a SCARA is that it is fully constrained, except for rotation around the Z axis at each joint. After their ceiling fan broke, tuenhidiy noticed that the fan’s base with its beefy bearing would be perfect for this application. They took that, added a couple of stepper motors and belts, some aluminum extrusion, and a couple more bearings to create this simple SCARA.

An Arduino UNO Rev3 board controls those motors through a CNC Shield V3. Grbl firmware makes it easy to control the positions of the motors using just about any software a user could possibly want. Some simple calculations regarding the arm’s geometry and gear ratios should let appropriate software determine exactly where it is in space. For a demonstration, tuenhidiy added a DC solenoid for its magnetic capabilities. But anyone replicating this project can add their own end effector to suit their needs.

The post Ceiling fan becomes a “spaceship” SCARA robot arm appeared first on Arduino Blog.

When you think of automation, what’s the first image that comes to mind?

For many of us, it’s a robot. From the blocky, square-headed characters of sci-fi comic fame to household more complex creations like the Replicants of Blade Runner — robots have captured our collective imagination for a long time.

It’s no surprise, then, that lots of Arduino users eventually set out to build a robot of their own.

In this article, we’ll look at how to build your own robot with Arduino and share some project examples from other makers.

What exactly is a robot?

The term “robot” can cover a lot of potential meanings, so let’s agree on a definition.

Here’s what the Oxford Dictionary says:

“(especially in science fiction) a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and functions automatically.”

It’s a good start, but do all robots resemble humans? Here’s Oxford’s second definition:

“a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.”

This seems more accurate since it encompasses things like construction robots, robotic pets, and robotic vehicles.

Humans have been attempting to build robots for centuries, although most of our success has taken place within the last few decades. Today, thanks to advancements in hardware and automation technology, almost anyone can build their own robots at home.

What do you need to build a robot?

Building your own robot might seem like an unimaginably complex task. After all, aren’t robots the stuff of sci-fi movies and leaked military prototypes?

The good news is that building a robot doesn’t have to be a monumental undertaking, and can in fact be done with some fairly simple and easily obtained components.

Here’s what you’ll need:

  • Some simple components like wheels, sensors, and switches (this will vary greatly depending on the type of robot you’re planning to build)
  • Some basic coding and automation skills (you don’t need to be a coding wizard)
  • A microcontroller like the Arduino UNO R4, for example.

This is, of course, just a starting point. You can build a fairly simple robot, or you can ramp up the complexity and sophistication as much as you like — the sky really is the limit here. For beginners, though, you can find everything you need at the hardware store.

Explore Arduino robots

With Arduino’s products and other components, it’s possible to build your own robots more easily than ever before.

We need to look no further than the Arduino Project Hub to find a ton of inspiring ideas. Let’s explore a few.

Line-following robot

Robots don’t have to be ultra-complex humanoid feats of engineering.

In fact, if you’re just getting started with robotics, it helps to keep things simple. Check out this great example — it’s a simple, car-shaped robot designed to follow a colored line on the floor.

The robot constantly monitors data from its infrared sensors in real time and adjusts movement based on feedback, ensuring it never strays from the line.

If this kind of project interests you, you’ll love the upcoming Arduino Alvik, which will have a line-follower functionality. Alvik’s user-friendly interface makes MicroPython coding and robotics project development easier than ever, making learning and creating a breeze. 

Alvik is also equipped with a range of sensors including a ToF distance sensor, line follower array, color sensor, and more. It’s especially impressive when it comes to swiftly detecting and navigating obstacles and colors.

Join the waiting list here to be first in line for updates about Arduino Alvik.

A piano-playing robot

Did you think playing music was a uniquely human trait?

Well… think again — this musically-inclined robot is capable of controlling piano keys automatically. The device was able to play piano keys 1,875 times in the space of a minute, beating the human world record by a significant margin.

The project used a range of tools including solenoids and a custom-designed Java software interface.

A chess-playing robot arm

Robots have been giving us humans a run for our money in the world of chess for quite some time.

For a new spin on the machines vs. humans saga, take a look at this robotic arm capable of physically moving the chess pieces.

The arm was created using a 3D printer and works by using a visual recognition system to watch the opponent’s move and then formulate a response. 

One of the most interesting things about this robot is the code used for move recognition. Because the robot uses visual recognition to follow the human’s moves, there’s no need for additional complex hardware like reed switches to be built into the chessboard, unlike other chess-playing robots.

Stay tuned for Robotics Week!

If you have a passion for building robots or just want to learn more about this topic, you’ll love Robotics Week, which takes place this year from April 6th-13th.

It’s a full week of events — many of which are virtual — all centered around robotics and STEM.

And if that’s not enough for you, this year’s Control Automation Day will focus on the theme of robotics: register today to see Arduino’s session on March 26th, “Arduino Pro Opens the Door to Robot Control for Agriculture, Biotech, and Manufacturing,” showcasing a success story based on the Portenta Machine Control by “Robotics for the Real World” provider R2 labs.

In the meantime, visit our Project Hub for more inspiration — where you can search by category and difficulty level. And don’t forget to share your own projects with our community!

The post Can I build my own robot with Arduino? appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Fans off Wallace and Gromit will all remember two things about the franchise: the sort of creepy — but mostly delightful — stop-motion animation and Wallace’s Rube Goldberg-esque inventions. YouTuber Gregulations was inspired by Wallace’s Autochef breakfast-cooking contraption and decided to build his own robot to prepare morning meals.

Gregulations wanted his Autochef-9000 to churn out traditional full British breakfasts consisted of buttered toast, eggs, beans, and sausage. That was an ambitious goal, because each of those foods requires several steps to prepare. Gregulations’ solution was to, essentially, create one large machine that contains several smaller CNC machines. Each one is distinct and tailored to suit a particular food. In total — if you add up all of the different sections — this is a 12-axis CNC machine.

The Autochef-9000’s central controller is an Arduino Mega 2560 board. But even with the power and number of pins available, that wouldn’t have been able to handle everything. So it divvies out some tasks to Arduino UNO Rev3 boards.

As you would expect, this takes quite a lot of heat to cook everything. That’s why the Autochef-9000 contains several electric heating elements, which the Arduinos control via relays.

Users can order food using a touchscreen menu system or a smartphone interface. Autochef-9000 will then whir to life. It will open and heat a tin of beans, grab and heat a sausage, hard boil an egg, and toast and then butter bread fed from a magazine. Finally, it will deposit all of those items onto a plate.

There is a lot going on inside of this machine and Gregulations breezes past a lot of the technical details, but it is a joy to see in action. And unlike Wallace’s inventions, this one hasn’t caused any serious disasters (yet).

The post Autochef-9000 can cook an entire breakfast automatically appeared first on Arduino Blog.

If you have an interest in robotics, it can be really difficult to know where to start. There are so many designs and kits out there that it becomes overwhelming. But it is best to start with the basics and then expand from there after you learn the ropes. One way to do that is by building MertArduino’s adorable app-controlled robot dog.

This is a little more complex than a typical line-following rover kit, but it is still approachable for beginners. It uses eight inexpensive MG90S hobby servo motors to walk on four legs, plus one more servo to rotate the head. The tutorial explains how to create a smartphone app for controlling the robot and there is an ultrasonic sensor hidden in the dog’s eyes to help it detect obstacles. 

To construct this robot, you will first need to 3D print the body, legs, and head. Those parts are small enough to print on almost any model of 3D printer. You’ll then need the custom PCB, onto which all of the electronic components attach. You can order that from any PCB fabrication service. Using basic through-hole soldering techniques, you can populate that PCB with an Arduino Nano board, an HC-05 Bluetooth module (for communication with a smartphone), and various miscellaneous components like resistors and a voltage regulator. Power comes from a pair of 18650 lithium battery cells.

After assembly, you can begin controlling the robot using the provided app. Or you can follow the instructions to make your own app with the help of MIT’s handy block-based Scratch programming tool.

If you want to dip your toes into the world of robotics, this seems to be a fun way to do it.

The post Build yourself this simple app-controlled robot dog appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Most people with an interest in robotics probably dream of building android-style humanoid robots. But when they dip their toes into the field, they quickly learn the reality that such robots are incredibly complex and expensive. However, everyone needs to start somewhere. If you want to begin that journey, you can follow these instructions to assemble your own talking humanoid robot.

This robot, dubbed “CHAD,” is a humanoid torso with moving arms, face tracking, and some voice assistant capabilities. It can understand certain voice commands, provide spoken responses, and even hold chat bot-style conversations. The arms weren’t designed to lift anything, but they are capable of movement similar to human arms up to the wrists and that gives CHAD the ability to gesture. It can also move its head to follow a face that it sees.

CHAD achieves that on a remarkably small budget of just ?5000 (about $60 USD) with a handful of components: two Arduino UNO R3 boards, several hobby servo motors, simple L298N motor drivers, and a PC power supply. One Arduino board controls most of the servo movement, while the second focuses on the face tracking movement.

The Arduino boards don’t handle the processing, which is instead outsourced to a PC running Python scripts. Those do the heavy lifting of face recognition, voice recognition, and voice synthesis. The PC then passes movement commands to the Arduino boards through serial.

CHAD’s body and most of its mechanical components are 3D-printable, with two lengths of wood acting as the primary structure. That helps to keep the cost down, giving everyone the chance to create a humanoid robot.

The post This DIY humanoid robot talks back to you appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Möbius strips are often used to symbolize infinity, because they are continuous loops with only a single surface. They can’t exist in real life, because every solid object in reality has thickness—even if it is very thin, like a piece of paper. But we can construct similar objects that loop and twist over on themselves. James Bruton demonstrated that concept by building an RC tank with Möbius strip tracks.

This project doesn’t seem to have any real purpose beyond curiosity. Bruton wanted to see how Möbius strip tracks would work and so he constructed this tank to find out. The treads and most of the rest of the tank were 3D-printed, with the tread links getting a special design that lets them pivot relative to each other. They pivot just enough that the each track was able to make a half-twist over the course of 8 or 9 links. That half-twist is what makes the tracks similar to a Möbiusstrip, because the “outer” surface continues endlessly and transitions to being the “inner” surface and then repeats forever.

As is the case for many of Bruton’s creations, this tank has an Arduino Mega 2560 for control. It receives commands from Bruton’s universal remote through an OrangeRX DSM2 radio receiver. A DC gear motor drives each track, providing plenty of torque.

In testing, this tank performed similarly to a standard RC tank—though there is, presumably, more friction to overcome. When the tracks are bare plastic, they slip on hard surfaces a lot. When Bruton added grippy pads, they didn’t slip quite enough. But interestingly, the unique geometry of the tracks means that one “side” can be grippy and the other slick. The track will then alternate between the two, even though that doesn’t seem to provide any real benefit.

The post This RC tank has Möbius strip tracks appeared first on Arduino Blog.

When the BattleBots TV show first hit the airwaves in 2000, it felt like we were finally living in the future. Engineers and enterprising hobbyists from around the world would compete to build the most destructive robots, which then entered into televised mortal combat within an arena. The original series had many notable robots, but two of those most iconic were Death Roll and Hydra. Max Imagination replicated those on a small scale for mini living room battles.

BattleBots competitors could win their matches by either damaging their opponents to the point where they could no longer operate, or by making them unable to move. The most popular way to achieve that second goal was by flipping over the opposing robot and that is the tactic used by both Death Roll and Hydra. Death Roll did so with a spinning disc that catches on its opponents body, while Hydra used a hydraulic arm like a pancake spatula to flip opponents.

Max Imagination wanted to create faithful reproductions of both bots, but at a size small enough to be 3D-printed. Because hydraulics are difficult at this scale, Hydra’s flipping arm is spring-actuated and cocked with a motor-driven gear mechanism. Otherwise, both replicas work in the same way as their bigger ancestors.

Each robot takes advantage of the new Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board for control. Max Imagination programmed those with self-hosted web interfaces, so users can pilot the bots through smartphones. The bodies were designed in Autodesk Fusion 360 to be entirely 3D-printable and Max Imagination is even selling those models for anyone who wants to construct their own fighting robots.

The post Replicating two of history’s most iconic BattleBots with the Arduino UNO R4 appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Percussion instruments are likely the first kind that humanity invented, because they’re quite simple: hit a thing and a noise happens. Different things produce different frequencies with different timbres, and glass bottles have a nice xylophonic sound to them. Because glass bottles are easy to find among discarded garbage, Jens of the Jens Maker Adventures YouTube channel took advantage of them to build this awesome robotic instrument.

Jens started by collecting a bunch of different bottles. He tapped each to while searching to get a sense of the notes they produced, which he could then lower by adding some water to fine tune the pitch. Once he had enough bottles to cover a range of notes, he set out to construct a robot to play them.

Solenoid actuators tap each bottle and an Arduino UNO Rev3 board controls that tapping. It does so according to MIDI files created in the popular Ableton software. Jens matched the available notes in Ableton to those produced by the glass bottles, so he could simply compose melodies using those notes knowing that the robot could play them. The Arduino reads the MIDI files output by Ableton and strikes the corresponding bottles.

Finally, Jens laser-cut a plywood frame and enclosure that holds the bottles, the Arduino, and the solenoids. It works with seven bottles, which is the number of notes this machine can play.

Jens demonstrated that by playing a guitar along with the robotic instrument and the result sounds very pleasant — especially for something made with garbage.

The post This robot turns old bottles into a musical instrument appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Robots with wheels are commonplace and even legged robots have lost some of that allure that comes from new technology. But what else is there? Well, if we look at nature we can see all kinds of interesting ways that critters manage to move around. Worms, for instance, turn wriggling into forward motion, with inchworms relying on peristalsis — the same mechanism your esophagus utilizes to move food to your stomach. James Bruton wants to build a peristaltic motion robot big enough to ride and constructed this prototype to test his ideas.

Peristalsis is well understood as it relates to some applications, like pumps. But this robot is a unique challenge because of the scale and because it is made of rigid bodies. All of the mechanical parts were 3D-printed and an Arduino Mega 2560 board controls the movement by actuating servo motors. For now, the Arduino only has to coordinate the movement by activating the servos in sequence. That’s because this prototype only moves forward and backward. But the full-scale rideable version would be more complex to allow for turns.

The secret to this robot’s movement is all in the linkages that connect the roller “feet” to the body. They resemble scissor lift mechanisms, but the tops mount to carriages that can slide forward and backward independently. The servo motors handle the actuation, so the Arduino can control the extension of the linkages and the position of the feet along the longitudinal axis. The robot has four segments and two of them make contact with the ground at any given time, while the opposite two lift up and move forward to repeat the cycle.This isn’t very efficient, but it does work. And, importantly, it has the potential to handle a lot of weight. That will be very useful if Bruton does scale the robot up to ride on

The post Prototyping a rideable peristaltic motion robot appeared first on Arduino Blog.

The future we were promised was supposed to include robot maids and flying cars. The future we got has Roomba vacuums and Southwest Airlines. But at least those Roomba vacuum robots work pretty well for keeping floors slightly cleaner. Sadly, they leave elevated surfaces untouched and dust-ridden. To address that limitation, Jared Dilley built this tiny DIY Roomba to clean his desk.

Dilley is a dog owner and so his desk ends up with quite a bit of dust and loose hair, even though his dog is large and doesn’t sit on the desk—a mystery all pet owners will find relatable. Fortunately, Dilley is an engineer and had already created a small Arduino-controlled tank robot a while back. That operated a bit like a Roomba and would drive around until its ultrasonic sensor detected an obstacle, at which point it would turn. Dilley just needed to repurpose that robot into small mean cleaning machine.

The 3D-printed robot operates under the control of an Arduino UNO Rev3 through a motor driver shield. Originally, it only had the ultrasonic sensor, which was enough to detect obstacles in front of the robot. But because its new job is to patrol desks and countertops, Dilley had to add “cliff” sensors to keep it from falling off. He chose to put an infrared sensor at each of the front two corners. The Arduino will register the lack of a reflection when one of those sensors goes past an edge, and will then change course. A Swiffer-like attachment on the back of the robot wipes up dust and dog hair.

The post Tiny DIY Roomba cleans desks and countertops appeared first on Arduino Blog.



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