Printing a Robot Arm

Back in 2006, a client of mine wanted to make a robot arm to play Go. The idea was to allow remote play on real boards with the robot arm moving the stones for the remote player. Two arms would be used to keep two physical boards in sync with each arm matching the moves made by the other player. The goal was to make an arm that would fold into itself so you could easily transport it in a backpack. It would have two cameras: one to watch the board and another one to guide the vacuum picker to a piece.

The arm was designed in Autocad and printed on a Dimension ABS printer at Tech Shop in San Mateo. I showed this arm at Maker Faire 2010 in San Mateo and got a "Editors Choice" award. Even though this project was done in 2006, I wanted to document it now for the "Make It Real" contest.

The robot design here, the videos and the drawings are all (c) 2006-2012 Tim Black. I want to retain the rights to the arm design, so it is not fully documented here. The purpose of this instructable is to show you an overview of the steps that were required to design and build the arm from sketches to working prototype.

Step 1: Sketches

I had the idea for the design before I had the means to build it. It all started with paper and pencil drawings. I worked out the basic interplay of the parts and the way that the parts of the arm would fold into each other doing a number of these rough sketches. Not shown here are the many discarded ideas and experiments that led to this design that we decided to build.