pAtCHing uP

Servos did not come our way(they were available online though,but that did not seem to be a feasible solution).We decided to patch it up using chinese gear motors and high precision potentiometers as the input device and also for the feedback mechanism(ours will be an automatic servomechanism feedback control system).
The links are ready.They are made of 5 mm thick aluminium rods about 6 1/2 inches long .Currently work is going on the assembling of the gear boxes and the links on the platform.
After the assembly part is over we will start working on the circuit.we will be using OP-AMPS for amplifying the input voltage signals that will then be fed to the potentiometers attached to the gear boxes and the resultant signals will hopefully move them.
The construction part though is not going too well ,had to make numerous changes midway and it is taking up too much time .We would have liked it had it been completed in 2-3 days time as a chunk of the time will have to be spent on the simulation part and to check whether everything is falling in place.
For the time being we are engaged in drilling holes into plastic cases and aluminium rods(I hate to say it but the construction part has been up to late a comedy of errors).Trying hard to complete as efficiently as we can.Seems like we need a lot of luck to finish the entire thing by the 5th of next month.The hardest part was the conceptualisation and the designing part, we thought,and that everything after that would turn out to be a cakewalk .It seems now that our plan backfired .
moral:NEVER GO FOR MANUFACTURING WITHOUT THE COMPLETE PLAN LAID OUT IN FRONT OF YOU

BitS AND pIEceS

So far our search for a suitable servo motor has proved futile.Getting the things that we require seems an uphill task as of now.Well without wasting any time i had to think about the programming part (although i would have liked to have dealt with it at a later stage).
Anyhow it seems now that a job done can be fruitful in the future,and keeping in mind just that here is an overview of what exxactly are we trying to achieve or rather intending to achieve
1.a method of manually feeding by using a robot control device by
(a)specifying a target co ordinate system for the manual feed
(b)selecting a reference co odinate system to manually feed the specified target co ordinate system
(c)inputting the content of the manual feed according to the given co ordinate system of the robot controller
(d)moving the given target co ordinate system accordingly and lastly
(e)to make the arm move accordingly and equivalently to the successive movements


For the programming aspect it seems that as of now G-code would be appropriate.First of all it is a programming language for contolling CNC machines.It is mainly used to command the machine what type of action to perform(it is mainly used in champhering,drilling etc by CNC machines;wikipedia has an overview of the G-code in case u have no idea on what it is)
It is a simple programming language that can be learnt in a few hours and definitely not too hard to grasp.Although when writing sophisticated programs it can be tedious as the script often exceed 1000s of pages and can be quite a pain to debug.Programming is not my forte,though our arm would not require any complicated coding as far as i can think ans some basic appliations of this simple machine tol language can prove to be useful.
We are only thinking of keeping the manufacturing and controlling as simple as we can.If our project turns out to be a success we can always change the coding and make it more functionable (we can use BASIC language on PIC microcontrollers to have better results)
But that I would consider another day.