A mechanical arm that can shift gears in less than a twentieth of a second

Look what Father Christmas brought me for Christmas:

robot_arm1

Build time was about half of Christmas Day. It is a pretty good design and seems fairly sturdy. The weight of the 4 D battery cells keeps it nicely planted on the table and the inclusion of an on/off switch on the base keeps battery drain to a minimum. My only gripe would be that it does not use stepper motors and instead relies on a worrying “click, click, I’m failing” noise when any gear reaches the end of its travel.

So far it has been connected up to my Linux Mint netbook and runs a treat after following the instructions by maxinbjohn. Where John writes “Select the 'USB ROBOTIC ARM' and build the kernel” you will want to:

sudo make -f Makefile
sudo make install


from within the directory you downloaded the files to (or use git to clone the files). That seemed to work fine for me.

Now to connect it to one of my Raspberry Pi’s for a bit of Python programming.
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