This 3D-Printable Six-Axis Robot Arm Is Capable and Versatile
This open source, 3D-printable six-axis robot arm is a capable and affordable design to build.
If you want to get started in the robotics field, but don’t have a specific application in mind, it is hard to go wrong with a robot arm. You’ll get a versatile robot that is useful in a wide range of use cases, giving you the opportunity to learn the fundamentals. This open source, 3D-printable six-axis robot arm is a capable and affordable design to build.
The robot shown in the DIY Engineers video is based on the BCN3D-Moveo design. That’s a five-axis robot arm and DIY Engineers tweaked it, adding an extra axis and streamlining the bill of materials.
DIY Engineers 3D printed all of the parts on an Elegoo Centauri Carbon, which might just be the best value in the 3D printer market. For the controller, they chose an Arduino Mega 2560 board and paired that with a RAMPS 1.4 board. That has TMC2208 stepper drivers, plus DM542T drivers from STEPPERONLINE for the larger stepper motors. There are a gripper end effector and a separate end effector with a Raspberry Pi HQ Camera, complete with motorized aperture and focus adjustment.
The Arduino only handles the low-level control of the motors, while all of the complex processing happens on a separate computer running ROS2. That works with Arviz and MoveIt, so some pretty sophisticated control is possible.
If you want to build this robot arm yourself, the modified 3D models are available on Nexprint.