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Well, it's been a long time but finally I'm making progress. The arm is essentially built now but I have to do the final wiring and tidying up. I managed to get some more powerful servos for it, 3 cirrus ones that have an enormous torque of 13kg/cm! These seem ok for the arm and so I've concentrated on the software side. I've built the Arduino sketch for controlling the arm and a VB express app for sending serial commands to the arm. Next will be a full calibration of the arm from within VB then onto building fun things for it to do, based on pre-programmed locations and movements. I'm not sure the robot has enough reach to do what I intended it to do initially (play chess) but it should be good for a lot of other things instead. More pics and vids coming soon of the arm in motion!
Sunday April 19th 2009
I've made some good initial progress on my robot arm, with the arm essentially being built! It still needs extensions to all the servo wires so that they will all reach the base to connect up to power and the arduino, but first I need to do some servo testing, which I've started on with the gripper assembly. A simple arduino sketch has got my gripper opening and closing. The next stage will be to get a more complex servo program working, and then onto getting the arduino to accept servo positions via serial. From that point on it's software as I plan to write a VB app to control it properly. More details under the robotics page.
Thursday Feb 19th 2009
Well the site is now getting some polish, with a random site header and hit counter. It's hard learning how to do these things again from scratch as I only do them once every few years or so!
I may do a hit counter for every page, to see what people are most looking at, but I can get that data from behind the scenes logs anyway so it may be redundant. I'd like to integrate an easier to use blog onto it (I'm just editing this page and uploading it now). I tried to use blogger and ftp it which worked after a fashion but I didn't have the control I wanted. I did do a web based blog with Empire too, so I may ressurect it. But I don't want to spend the next week doing the website, I'd like to move onto building my planned robotic arm.
Monday Feb 16th 2009
After a long period of website inactivity, I have decided to remake the site to give it a more professional feel. This is a work in progress but I'm happy with how it's going so far.
I'm happy with my new artwork gallery section, a flash utility to display images. There is still a lot to put up, but it generally breaks down into adding 'more' to what I've already done like more images to the robotics section. Now that I have the main part done I can start on the tweaks. I did have a random image selector working on my Empire site, and I plan to integrate something like that again, to randomise the image in the main header so it's not just the Falcon all the time, and header images are very easy to do.
Sunday Feb 15th 2009