[anfractuosity]

I bought a 6DOF robot arm a while ago, which uses servos driven by PWM, which I found quite fun.

It was only around £70 for the servos + metal framework. I drive it with a Pi and a PCA9685 based I2C board.

I was driving with a 5V supply, but it looks like the servos can run at 6V, which I need to try, as the bottom servo in the arm doesn't seem to have quite enough power.

I'd like to sometime try to 'teach' it to draw with a pen (however badly), 'Inverse kinematics' feels rather scary though, so wonder if anyone might have any very basic tutorials on this.

Tangentially related, I just bought 'The Ultimate Guide To DIY Animatronics' yesterday, which I'm looking forward to reading when it arrives.

And have been watching a few videos on animatronics such as:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0R8-F4TmPI - 'Show and Tell: Animatronic Raven Kit!'

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNIfx0Xddzc - 'How Realistic Animatronics Are Made For Movies & TV | Movies Insider'

Curious if anyone has any recommendations for videos/books in this area?

[thomasthorpe]

Try the Robot Operating System documentation for the software and control side. If you can write the low level drivers then the ROS stack abstracts the IK and other middleware layers allowing you to focus on app and problem spaces.

https://docs.ros.org

[anfractuosity]

Thanks, that sounds really interesting, will definitely have to try that out.

[stonemetal12]

>'Inverse kinematics' feels rather scary though, so wonder if anyone might have any very basic tutorials on this.

You might look into graphics programming and 3d modeling. For example Blender supports Inverse Kinematics for creating character animation.

[anfractuosity]

That sounds a good plan, I've played with Blender a little, only for very simplistic stuff, but will have to look into its IK support.

[stonemetal12]

Found the article I was thinking about when I wrote the comment above.

https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Animation/IK

[gpm]

I'd be interested in a link to the arm you bought? (Or do you mean more along the lines of "designed"?)

[anfractuosity]

I bought from amazon, where it doesn't seem to be for sale any more, but it looks identical to - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005380691351.html (the silver one), with MG996 servos.