Regular patron and explorer Andrew Cambria ’29 has been working on a 3D-printed robot arm with six degrees of freedom! Using the Prusa MK4S 3D printer alongside some of our power tools around the makerspace, he printed, assembled, and fine-tuned each joint until the arm could move the way he wanted. Because each robot has six degrees of freedom with a high range of motion, the project can have many use cases. Each rotating joint is powered by a servo that connects to an Arduino board.
Throughout the project, he also faced minor difficulties. The tolerance for the holes where the servos were to be placed was too tight due to natural tolerances from FDM 3D printing. To fix this, he is planning to reprint the robot using our SLA resin, which will give the arm more rigidity and hold up better under repeated movement.
