Super cool. And it reminds me why to do these projects: you learn so much in pursuing the project end-goal: motor selection, 3D printing, model slicing, ESP32 programming, etc.
I expect to see a second robot soon with significant changes based on the lessons learned.
(I too just picked up a Bambu A1 printer after deciding to dive a little more into 3D printing. I can confirm it is amazing compared to the Ender-3 I had only dabbled with a bit before.)
Thanks! Exactly - I feel much more comfortable talking about the hardware at work now after having made this and feel more confident about making something more advanced.
This is my first printer so I don't have anything to compare it to, but to me it seems to "just work"
It just works and it's so, so much faster. Went from an Ender 3 v2 to a Bambu P1S. No more re-leveling the bed, no more first layer adhesion problems, and your prints run 4-6 times quicker.
First of all, all Bambu models are substantially faster while also achieving the same or better print quality.
Bambu printers are much more polished in terms of hardware and software, making 3D printing more accessible. Their software is more of a closed source thing, but also a lot more polished.
I think a big part of this can be attributed to the 3D printing scene maturing a bit, but a lot is also specific to Bambu Labs
Just a super well made all-proprietary FDM. X1 is CoreXY, A1 is i3/bed slinger. Fundamentally same as anything. Does all kinds of filaments and even 100% infills like cakewalk. If you manage to make it do spaghetti you get a lot of eyeballs. But still the same yak just super meticulously shaven. I mean I wouldn't need it at all at all.
I can't help but feeling very envious (in a nice way) of your situation with coworkers. It seems like when you had an issue, you had someone 10 steps ahead of you willing to help out, give advice, lend a part etc.
This project seemed to go as well as my side projects, but when I run into a hiccup, I wait a month for a part on AliExpress, or wander around at Home Depot looking for something that I don't know what it is yet.
Kudos to you for surrounding yourself with great people. Thanks for the write up.
I've been a software engineer for 40+ years now. I still remember the one time I wrote firmware for a cable-driven robot hand. It's such a rush to type a command on a keyboard, and something on the bench next to you goes "wrrrrp!".
This. I remember in the 90's working on a software to control a plastic molding machine that made plastic cups, and hit enter and feel the power of a pneumatic system pushing up the platform where i was standing.
Same here. I wrote my first robot in the 80s. Well it was actually scientific device for my main job. Among various sensors it had moving parts controlled by solenoids and stepper motors. Same sense of excitement when the thing worked.
Awesome writeup! As someone who is roughly in this same stage of hardware learning, this had me laughing.
> I went into "screw with it until it works" mode. I took it apart, re-applied the magnet, swapped wires around, did all kinds of stuff. After a while of this, the error finally went away! No idea why though.
Cool project! Since the arm seems to be a 2 DoF arm in a 2D application, you don't really need numerical optimization but can get the analytical solution to the inverse kinematics problem. Otherwise using previous joint states as initial guess for the optimization is good so that you don't get weird "swings" in the arm (rarely happen in 2D)
To put it simply: there's only one solution for each 2d position, if you force the mid joint to always be on one side (and that preferred side can be allowed to switch, to minimize accelerations of the lower arm).
For a more refined machine, there is the XScara[0], a DIY SCARA 3D Printer that can be used for more than 3d print. I made one and change the 3d print head with a laser system, and also had a pen that can be used as a plotter.
See fluidnc http://wiki.fluidnc.com/en/config/kinematics as an example where you can get kinematics going without too much effort. It also has links to more pen plotter implementations to learn from.
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I expect to see a second robot soon with significant changes based on the lessons learned.
(I too just picked up a Bambu A1 printer after deciding to dive a little more into 3D printing. I can confirm it is amazing compared to the Ender-3 I had only dabbled with a bit before.)
This is my first printer so I don't have anything to compare it to, but to me it seems to "just work"
Bambu printers are much more polished in terms of hardware and software, making 3D printing more accessible. Their software is more of a closed source thing, but also a lot more polished.
I think a big part of this can be attributed to the 3D printing scene maturing a bit, but a lot is also specific to Bambu Labs
This project seemed to go as well as my side projects, but when I run into a hiccup, I wait a month for a part on AliExpress, or wander around at Home Depot looking for something that I don't know what it is yet.
Kudos to you for surrounding yourself with great people. Thanks for the write up.
We are lucky to have him around too.
Deleted Comment
Demonstration of the arm: https://x.com/ChrisMGreer/status/1867278261631561996
[1]https://github.com/TheRobotStudio/SO-ARM100
[2]https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot
> I went into "screw with it until it works" mode. I took it apart, re-applied the magnet, swapped wires around, did all kinds of stuff. After a while of this, the error finally went away! No idea why though.
[0] https://github.com/madl3x/x-scara
Instead of inventing your own, you could have used Gcode as the protocol language.
Using Gcode is a good idea, though it does seem a bit overkill for this simple application