Open Source Controller Revives Dead Industrial Robots

Few things excite the imagination of a hardware hacker more than big, powerful robots. Should a 3,000-pound industrial robot appear in their driveway one day, a person with a penchant for toying with machines may disappear into their garage for the next several months, only to briefly reappear when their supply of energy drinks starts to dip dangerously low. But this kind of hobby is for a select few, as large industrial robots typically sell for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

However, as YouTuber Excessive Overkill pointed out in a recent video, you don’t need to be a trust fund baby to get your hands on a seriously cool industrial robot. Old machines that are starting to show their age can be picked up for pennies on the dollar. Excessive Overkill scored a $40,000 robot for the price of a Raspberry Pi 500+ in this way, along with a workshop full of similar bargains. But those bargains do come with plenty of hidden costs in terms of elbow grease that you will have to put into their repair.

The robots themselves are frequently in pretty good shape, but it is the control systems that are the real problem. The electronics become obsolete, lose their memory, and the manufacturers will be of no help in getting you back on track. It is for this reason that Excessive Overkill spent the last two years working on a custom, open source controller for industrial robots. It is based on Arm chips that run a Linux operating system with an Artix-7 FPGA that has been programmed to directly interface with the encoders and motor drivers that power a robot’s movements.

Even with all this help, you still need to have a lot of domain-specific knowledge to get a new machine up and running (not to mention a lot of free space in your home). The controller can interface with just about any robot out there in theory, but the communication protocol needs to be worked out first. Chances are, plenty of other things will need attending to as well.

So for those who do not have an industrial robot in their future, Excessive Overkill made an interactive display for Open Sauce where they can try one out. It makes use of a 3D mouse as a controller. As the mouse is moved in three-dimensional space, the robot copies its actions. This was made possible by reading the outputs of the mouse’s encoders with an STM32 microcontroller, then feeding that information into the robot’s controller.

Excessive Overkill showed how natural this interface was to use. It made short work of stacking blocks and picking up other hardware. It was even accurate enough to write with, however the lack of force feedback made it difficult to avoid crushing the writing surface.

Whether you are looking to get into the world of industrial robots, or you just want to live vicariously through Excessive Overkill, this video is not one to miss.