dincer hepguler robotics page01

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Always wanted to make a robotic arm which is remotely controlled by the help of a microprocessor. these gadgets are always pricey. in the end i found OWI 535 which is fairly good looking and inside my budget. i already had few Arduinos around and decided to make a robotic arm out of it. i began with making a motor controller using Adafruit motor shield. however it had only 4 motor controls. i needed a 5th controller for the gripper and added few electronics using a relay and a transistor to control the gripper motor.  the task was not easy. i had to use an Arduino to move the arm and another Arduino clone which is a FIO to control the Nunchuck which i used as a wireless joystick. FIO has an X-Bee socket and can send controls wirelessly to the other Arduino which is controlling the arm. there is another X-Bee connected to this Arduino and they are communicating wirelessly... later i will place this robotic arm on my robotic rover to fetch things...

	here you can see my OWI 535 Robotic arm and its components... an Arduino is moving the arm withs its internal power... controls are sent wirelessly by a Nunchuck connected to a FIO and x-bee powered by a cellphone battery... im using the Nunchuck joystick and its accelerometer to move the arm and its 2 buttons to control the gripper...

      You can find a video of my robotic arm in action on YouTube  HERE

This is one of my solar bugs... i love BEAM robotics... this tiny solar robot uses the sun to move itself randomly with its 2 motors... the solar cell provides energy which is stored in the cap and transistors supplies this energy as bursts to the motors...

This is my workbench showing my solar plantbot. those solar cells will be the leaves powering the multicolor leds inside the crystall ball which is the flower... at the lower left corner you can also see my tiny bugbot which can wander around by itself using 2 motors and a 3v battery pack. the bugbot has 2 touch sensors in front which it uses to sense the obstacles and change direction...

please e-mail to me at  dhepguler@hotmail.com