“This entry is about a small stepper robot arm I made a while ago. In this post, I will first talk a bit about how I built it and what my thoughts were while doing so. After that, I will show some moving footage of what the thing is able to do.
A Small Stepper Robot Arm?
Yes. It uses stepper motors, it is small, and it is a robot arm. So here you go; A small stepper robot arm. Here’s a half-minute-video with some footage of the thing just sitting there.
How the project started
Some years ago I watched a YouTube video about a micro servo robot arm. It is quite a masterpiece in both video editing and electronics craftsmanship. Having seen this video, I tried for a while to do build a similar robot arm with the same servos. The problem with servos is, that it is very hard to get them to move slowly/smoothly. I tried an approach to re-implement the servo’s controller by getting rid of the microcontroller in the servo and just using the driver-IC and potentiometer output in combination with an Arduino Nano. I wasn’t able to get satisfactory results, and as so often, I started doing other things and forgot about this project.
Then I stumbled upon this extremely cheap gear-headed stepper motor which goes by the name “28BYJ-48”.”