Tag: Robot Overlord

Robot Arm Tutorials

How to make your robot arm talk to Robot Overlord

2020-06-09 Dan

Robot Overlord already simulates and drives robot arms. If you are building a new robot arm, it only makes sense to work with Robot Overlord and get the job done faster. Here’s a few tips to get you going faster.

The medium is the message

Robot Overlord can open a serial connection at your chosen baud rate 8-N-1 style. All Robot Overlord commands are less than 64 bytes long and all of them end with a new line (\n) character.

The syntax

Rather than write a long post that might get out date, here’s a link to the Robot Overlord Wiki page with the current syntax and formatting rules.

https://github.com/MarginallyClever/Robot-Overlord-App/wiki/GCODE

Note that this list isn’t the canonical list, either – the real deal is in the firmware for the Sixi robot, as that is the robot we currently write to support. In the future and this is out of date, let me know!

Of course talking to the app isn’t enough. You’ll also want to add a model of your arm to Robot Overlord so that the kinematics are correct.

As always we have helpful forums where you can get help with your robot project.

News Robot Arm

Robot Overlord : New 3D Manipulator Controls

2019-12-06 Dan

After nearly a week of screaming at my monitor, I finally got a new system for rotating and translating Sixi2’s hand.

The old method used…

  • mouse LMB for XY translation
  • SHIFT+mouse LMB for XY rotation
  • ALT+mouse LMB for Z translation AND Z rotation

Which (technically) worked, but was super hard to do well.

technically correct

The new system is much easier

  • Double click the robot you want to move and the translate tool will appear.
  • Hover over each handle and it will change color. Click and drag the active handle to drag the robot’s hand. If the robot cannot move the angry joint will turn white, then red.
  • Hold shift to replace the translate tool with the rotate tool. Hover over each handle (the colored rings) and they will change color. Click and drag on the handles to rotate the robot’s hand.

Also

In the future I may even remove the need for the shift key so that everything can be done with a mouse or a touch pad or maybe even a sip+puff.

I tried several things that didn’t work out, like using OpenGL’s Select Buffer. I also notice the rotation handles don’t stay inside the grey circle when they are in the far corners of the screen and I don’t have an answer for that yet.

If you want to read the code in the open source project, start in org.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.DragBall

Also much love to https://www.scratchapixel.com/. Their 3D graphics tutorials kept coming up when I searched for things I needed in Robot Overlord. If you want to learn 3D graphics it is a clean, simple, effective resource.

Robot Arm

Intuitive robot programming

2019-08-28 Dan

While making demos of what the Sixi arm can do I discovered that I’m a terrible driver. More than a few times I wanted to drive the hand +X and instead rotated the wrist, or got the direction wrong. It might not seem like much now but if it were holding a cup of liquid or in a narrow confine that would be very bad for the end user!

A good fix would be a way to preview a move before committing to that move, and maybe having some kind of undo feature. Now by moving the joystick the blue “ghost” arm moves while the yellow “live” arm stays still. When you like the pose you’ve reached, press X on the playstation controller to commit that move. If you want to undo – put the ghost back on the live arm – press the circle button on the playstation controller. Lastly if you want to drive the arm back to the starting position, triangle button will move the ghost to the starting position and then X would commit the move.

Let me know in the comments how is your experience with driving the simulation. I will be dedicating the next few weeks getting ready for the Vancouver Mini Maker Fair, September 14, 2019 at Science World.

News Robot Arm

Robot Arm Study 5 in Robot Overlord, Tool mounting design

2017-11-17 Dan

I’ve got Study 5 working in Robot Overlord.  The STL files are heavy in detail so the load time is long, but it works.  Forward and Inverse kinematics as good as any other arm in the system (which already includes the 7bot, MANTIS, and others).  I still don’t have enough time to rip apart the inner workings and rebuild it with a record & play back mechanism.  That would be very nice…

Also here is the hole pattern if you want to design a tool that fits on the wrist of the robot.  I would love to see someone design an Automatic Tool Changer (ATC) so the robot could put down one tool, pick up another, and use any tool it is currently holding.

News

Robot Overlord: THOR added

2017-08-09 Dan

As I just wrote on the THOR project page, Robot Overlord now supports inverse and forward kinematics for the THOR robot.  One by one they all fall under my dominion!  MwahahahHAHAHAHAHhahahaha…..aha…