Playing with Maplin USB Robotic Arm

By admin August 27, 2012 Uncategorized 1 Comment

It is quite easy to get bored in Helsinki, specially when your friends are busy and nothing much to do at home (Not even cooking !). There are a couple of interesting places to visit in Helsinki when you get bored.

1. Helmet : Helsinki Metro Library : http://www.helmet.fi/en-US
2. Tennis Palace (name of a Movie Theater, basically to watch movies)

4. Small and beautiful Beaches

5. verkkokauppa : The Biggest Electronics store in Europe (they claim so.. ) : http://www.verkkokauppa.com/

6. Cycling through the beautiful islands in Helsinki and Espoo.

7. Hietaniemi Cemetery (Walking through the Lake side is a refreshing experience) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hietaniemi_cemetery

Last weekend, decided to visit Verkkokauppa to buy some basic cables to setup my personal “Lab at Home”. There I found some interesting things like Mini Weather Station and Maplin USB Robotic Arm. To follow my desire to play with some USB stuff, I bought the USB Robotic Arm. The Software CD that shipped with the H/W was only for Windows and all I wanted was to make it work with Linux. After google search, I landed in this page which had some great information related to the Reverse Engineering details of Robotic Arm’s Protocol :

http://notbrainsurgery.livejournal.com/38622.html

After some hours of writing – testing – rebooting cycle, the driver for the USB Robotic arm was ready and I pushed that to Github:
https://github.com/maxinbjohn/robotic_arm_driver

That followed a simple Python program to control the USB Robotic Arm using the driver:

https://github.com/maxinbjohn/robotic_arm_driver/blob/master/examples/python/motor.py

Finally uploaded the video of controlling Maplin USB ARM from Linux.

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjQgqJIH82Q