I have been obsessed with robot arms since i was 10.... I have been obsessing about building one recently.. I spent hors figuring out invese kinematics before i realized it was trig and looked on the net for formulas.. Anyways, i would really like to build a robot arm and\or a point digitizer. THey have similar hardware and design considerations.. I am curious about how Mach 2, Rhino, and other programs get their point cloud data... Is there a publication with some sort of protocol to provide x,y,z coordinates from serial port or something?

Im picturing encoders from mice, simple alumium tubing construction, a PIC micro step decoder and serial server.


any ideas? I am very interested in building this..

In addition, i keep waiting to find "opensource cnc" or soething similar

a real, organized effor to make some great quality opensource hardware and software available.. not cad\cam packages, but things like digitizing systems, 4,th,5th,6th axis designs, PCBs for all the important electrical components. I know there is interest in this. I will post more about it. If someone would donate some webspace, we could start.. And also use surceforge resources... Im sure we allready have alot of designs, they jsut need to be put together in a good format and tested by multiple users..

Just a thought..