Hello, I am new to Arduino and coding in general, however I've just spend a fair bit of money on a robotic arm and an Arduino Uno Rev3, they're both arriving tomorrow so I thought id start asking questions today.
First off I'm not a coder, I'm a engineer, I've helped people build robots before but those were coded by them I simply did the assembly and technical knowhow, non of the programming stuff, I have no idea what I'm doing, so please be kind and know that I'll probably ask a million and one questions.
What I want the robot to do
I want this robot to move freely, it has 5 servos, and I'd like them to turn in a randomly generated way, to make it seem like its moving on its own
I also want to have it turn to a fixed point when it hears a noise, I've bought a Arduino compatible microphone and think that it would be pretty cool if it could do that tbh.
As for more technical stuff I have no idea how to wire the Arduino into the arms controller board, I have no idea how to code any of this and as far as references go I'm struggling because I don't understand any of this stuff.
I am well aware that I should probably be taking baby steps here because I'm so clueless but If I didn't start building this robot now it was never getting build and I've had this idea in my folder for a while now, so for me it was a now or never.
Any and all help/references are appreciated just please be kind I know I'm outta my depth here
Even before your hardware arrives you can download and install the IDE and look at the examples it contains to give yourself a basic idea of what an Arduino sketch looks like. There are examples of controlling a servo
One word of warning. Do not power the servos from the Arduino 5V pin as the board cannot provide sufficient current to drive 5 servos. You will need to use an external power supply such as 4 AA batteries in series
Do start with baby steps such as blinking an LED,
controlling a single servo and printing random numbers before you embark on your real project
I bought the Learm 6DOF, it's fully metal, although its under many different company branding around the world it has good reviews (I'll link it under this comment) It also has its own controller for the servos, I'm just not sure how the controller and the arduino connect together also both the arm and the arduino come with power separate power connections so i was just gonna power them both individually, would that work?
Without knowing a great deal more about the arm and its control mechanism I cannot begin to answer your questions but what I will say is that it is going to take a great deal of effort on your part to be able to control this with an Arduino unless there is a library available to do the basics
The Amazon listing mentions video tutorials for the Arduino. Have you got links to them ?
My advice would be to put the arm aside for at least a month until you get to grips (pun intended) with the Arduino environment, but I am sure that you will want to jump straight in
I didn't notice the Arduino tutorials on the amazon page but I did some quick digging and found the exact same arm (From a different company) that has tutorials and what not on it.
I've also taken your advice and ordered an Arduino learning kit with like a bread board and leds, resistors and what not in it and I think I'll shelf it for a while so that it doesn't sit and get dusty or broken or something and take some time to learn the coding aspect.
From the screenshots of code there, it looks as though the Arduino will communicate with the robot arm over serial. Hopefully the tutorials you can download include some documentation.
