Robot World

Hi folks. Fantastic news - our Kickstarter project is now live!!! Click on the link to take a look, and feel free to share. And, of course, if you'd like, you can make a pledge to help support our developments :-) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1280292370/robot-arm-control-gui/description Until next time, That's all folks! Steve

Hi Folks. This is just a short post to let everyone know that our Kickstarter Project is going live on Friday 11th October. This is our Robot Arm Control GUI, which allows you to control a robot arm with up to 6 Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) from your PC via a USB link to an Arduino which drives the servo motors in the arm. Post 8 gives a run down on the GUI software, so be sure to take a look to see what it can do. Screenshot of the Robot Arm Control GUI software  We're in the final stages of testing now and putting together the User Guide. We aim to have the code available for downloading around the 16th December, just in time to hook it up to that new robot arm kit you get for Christmas, lol. To recap, the GUI allows you to control the arm using sliders to move each joint into a position. The position can then be stored in a table and the arm moved to another position, etc. In this way you can build up a sequence of moves to get the arm to perform a task. The sequence can

Hello Folks. First some GREAT NEWS! Our Robot Arm GUI Software has been approved as a project by Kickstarter, so we will be launching it very soon. Keep checking back for dates and more details. This software allows you to control a robot arm from your PC (Windows only at the moment) by creating a table of positions which can then be run as an automatic sequence. We are launching it at a price of only £5 to make it accessible to hobbyists and makers. As a launch special, the first 1000 people to back us on Kickstarter will get it for the amazingly low price of only£3. Multi user discounts will also be available for clubs and schools, again with an early bird discount for the first 1000 people who sign up. Now, on with the blog! In this post I thought I’d give some more insight into what we’re doing here at Phoenix Labs. For those of you who have been following us regularly, you may be aware that we are a small start-up company, set up by myself and my business partner, Sha

Hi Folks. It's been a while but now we're back! So, I thought I'd give an update on what we've been up to over the last few months. But first, some sad news. My mother, who had been in care for the last few years due to progressive Alzheimer's, sadly deteriorated over a few months and has passed away. She was the inspiration that led to the formation of this company, Phoenix Labs Ltd, with the goal of developing a robot which is sufficiently advanced to be able to provide a level of care to the elderly and disabled in their own homes. I and my family had supported her at her home for as long as possible before having to make the difficult decision for her to go into full time care. During that time we became aware of the strain this puts on a family, both in time and financially, to provide own home care for loved ones. Having experienced this I decided there must be something that could be done using today's technology to help others in the same situation, a

Hello folks. It’s been a while since my last post – almost 6 months! But I’m here again with another update, at last. It’s been a busy time (I think all my posts start like that, lol) but it really has. I took on a contract job in February (got to pay the bills!) which has me working at a clients 9-5 Monday – Friday, which has drastically cut down my time available for developing the robots. But I’ve managed to make some progress, none the less. In this post I’m going to describe the next step in my robot’s evolution – constructing a map of its environment. What that means is that the robot moves around as before, using an ultrasonic sensor to avoid obstacles, but this time, as the robot moves around, it plots its position, and the position of obstacles, on a map which can be displayed on a PC screen. How it knows its position is by using odometry and the magic of mathematics (my maths tutor was right, it has come in useful after all! Lol). For an

Hi folks. It’s been a busy time with one thing and another, but with Christmas now only days away I thought I’d get one more post in before it. Unfortunately I was thwarted in my attempt by my video camera breaking down. Never the less I have soldiered on and used my 'phone to shoot the video. This proved to be rather more time consuming as I don't have a tripod mount & remote control for it like I do for the video camera, so I had to do things several times over, pick the best (i.e. least shaky) bits and edit them together to get one decent stretch of video, but here we are now :-) . Last time I posted about fitting sensors to a cheap Maplin / OWI robot arm to give feedback on what angle each of the joints was at. In this post I am going to describe the other side of the operation, driving the motors. Getting ready to drop a building brick into a cup after picking it up from the the rectangle in the bottom left of the 'photo. . You may recall from