Robotic Arm
This is a small Arduino-based robotic arm that I created in high school. It uses a small TV remote and IR sensor for controls. At first, it was only able to be controlled manually, by pressing different buttons on the remote to move each servo individually. I then developed a basic system that allowed me to record and play back "points", which are the rotations of each servo at different time steps. This allowed the arm to automatically loop through a sequence of movements, as shown in the video below.
I then changed up design of the robot so that it was more sturdy and specialized to pick up small cardboard boxes. I also greatly improved the point recording and playback system so that I could cycle through recorded points and make edits. This allowed me to make more complex and interesting programs without having to restart if I made a mistake. I actually used a version of this program to develop the walking robots that I created later.
A few months later, I got a 3D printer and created designed 3D printed hardware. I also created a system that allowed the arm to move in straight lines along coordinate axis' by calculating the angle of each servo required to move the tip to the correct place. This also allowed the robot to automatically make simple drawings such as the circle being drawn on the right.
