My interest is stimulated by low-cost robot arms. I have one, but it is so low-cost it isn't servo's but just DC motors, so I will have to build all of the position encoding and feedback myself.
OWI Flex?
I've been thinking about picking one up myself for S&Gs; maybe set things up to detect limits via current monitoring. Part of me wants to hook one up to my Color Computer.
What's been stopping me (besides a ton of other projects in the queue) has been thoughts of re-creating a lightweight, low-cost version of the Armdroid arm, using foamcore or coroplast for the "body" of the arm, and adapting standard servos in some manner to allow their use at the base of the arm (so the arm doesn't have to move as much mass in the form of servos, which I think of as a step backward from the old arms of the 1980's - then again, servos are lighter and stronger, so maybe not?).
As a kid, I always wanted a robot arm for my computer; the closest I got was getting a Tomy Armatron for my birthday. Later I picked up a Popular Electronics magazine that described how to hook it up to a C=64 or Vic-20 (lots of hardware mods for that); I didn't understand anything about the electronics or hardware mods at the time, but it was a fascinating article that I kept around (and later scanned and put online - I need to put that back up on my website, now that I think about it).
By the time I had the knowledge and tools to do it, I can't bring myself to mod either of my Armatrons (I have two now; my original Tomy version, and a Radio Shack version), mainly because of fears that 10 years down the line I will find out I have "destroyed" something valuable on the collectors market (I collect Tomy robots). Even so, I may still snatch up a Radio Shack version for such crude hacking (I even have the motors used in the article; they were an item Radio Shack sold, and I bought 8 of them in two packs of four for future use).
Well, enough reminiscing...
