rene / meArm

Sample code to control Arduino Robotic Arm DIY kit

Robotic arm Arduino

Some time ago I've bough one of those DIY Robotic arm kits from Aliexpress. The kit comes with all acrylic pieces to assembly the arm structure, one arduino UNO board and one generic "mearm.WDT" joystick control shield (Fig. 1). This is a sample code to control the arm through the joysticks on the shield.

Fig. 1: meARM DIY kit. I've added one capacitor between Vdd and GND for filtering along with one heatsink on top of the voltage regulator to avoid spurious resets when the servos are overloaded (leading to high current drain).

Calibration

• Set CALIBRATION to 1 and run the code. Look at serial console and annotate the offsets when the joysticks are at center position (without touching them). Replace defines JOY_[LEFT,RIGHT]OFFSET[X,Y] with annotated values.

• Move the arm to the maximum position on each axis and annotate the maximum angle values for your assembling. Replace the corresponding defines with the right values.

• Set CALIBRATION to 0 and flash your board again. You are ready!

Record arm position

1. Move the arm at the position you want to save
2. Press and hold right knob for 2 seconds
3. LED will blink twice indicating that current position is saved
4. Move the arm to another position
5. Press right knob for 1 second to move the arm to saved position

PS: Position is saved to RAM, so it get losted on power off or reset.

Bug reports

Please, report them to [e-mail]