Robot arm for Repraping?

Hi there.
I'm an industrial design student (from Israel).

I got a nice Robotic Arm link -
http://www.theoldrobots.com/scorbot.html
and thought about a crazy idea..


Place an extruder instead of it Grips, (somehow) make it "speak" with reprap host software (I think it's REALLY complicated, since one first need to calculate, using Trigonometry, the position of the tip of the extruder.

I think it is possible, but I don't know where to begin with...

btw - the company claim it has a Repeatability of: +- .05mm (+- 0.02") (will this be sufficient for 3d printing?).

ANY ideas and/or thought will be greatly appreiciated

In that the Mendel only has a 0.1 mm positioning accuracy this should be better than what you need.
This will be much more expensive than building a Mendel but it would certainly look cool...

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

Well - considering I got it free (birthday present from a very good friend) - It won't be so expensive

I would still look more towards using the arm to pick and place parts so that small assemblies can be built. In particular, SMD devices can be mounted on pcbs using an arm like that.

The next question is can we redesign the arm to make it printable by a reprap?

Why replace the grips?

Why not simply make an extruder head that the grips can pick up?

This gives you another option: Make more extruder heads, and a place to store them next to the work area. Each can be preloaded with multiple types or colours of plastics. You can also heat each one up only when needed (ie: just before they are required).

You will have to work out a way to not get the plastic filament feeds tangled though, or bending the plastic too much.

It would be awesome to add a smaller version to your arm. In that way you can bring your own 3D printer everywhere you need it.

at the very least you can have a huge printable area,

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[mike-mack.blogspot.com]

I guess you will need more than an Arduino to control that, maybe one of the ARM boards could do it. Alternatively do the number crunching on a PC and output precomputed moves to an Arduino.
It is an interesting challenge to write the control algorithms. It is a similar task to the 5 axis CNC machines. The software for those is $1000s, I don't know of any open source software.

EMC2 can control a robot arm, google "emc2 robot arm" for examples. EMC2 doesn't use an Arduino type interface, it directly controls stepper drivers through a parallel printer port or card.

T Case

eranglr Wrote:
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> Well - considering I got it free (birthday present
> from a very good friend) - It won't be so
> expensive

I wish I had friends who bought me robotic arms for my birthday.

a) That looks like a servo arm, not a stepper arm. Makes controlling it a lot harder, and outside the realm of expertise for most of the reprappers

b) Dynamic accuracy is more important than static accuracy. Most arms have poor dynamic performance, even though they can be fairly accurate when still.

Possible to convert to a printer? Probably.

Realistically? Not without massive effort.

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www.Fablicator.com

hope you get results like this:

[singularityhub.com]