Stabilizing Arm

Goals of the Project

• Build an arm that can keep a platform parallel to the ground
  • Stabilizing a Lego Figurine
• Indicate to the user the range of motion
• Have an interactive and interesting control panel
• Display a 2D simulation of the arm

LabVIEW interfaces with an ESP32-C6 microcontroller to control three position servos, each with a -90° to 90° range of motion.

IMG_3028 2.MOV

The arm was designed with a milled aluminum base, an Acrylic stand, and arms with wood and 3D-printed outer links to make the arms lighter.

Front Panel

Minimal UI interface which controls the arm position with mouse movement in real time.

How does the interface work?

• The orange arc indicates the range of motion of the arm in the current configuration
• Hovering the mouse over the arc will make the arm move to that position.
• The animation catches up to the mouse and moves along the real arm
• The switch ont he top right activates the stabilizing platform
  • A message pops up on screen indicating to users that the range is limited to the left of the white line within the arc.
• The configuration panel allows users to set length of each link and the serial port controlling the ESP.

Back Panel & Sub Vis

• Images with quick description of all 7 of the relevant Vis (Toggle List)

Reflections:

• What I learned
  • A lot about the importance of building Vis so they can have one source of control and pass along relevant information.
    • For instance since I am using global mouse positions and want my mouse and picture to sync up in position, I need to keep track of origin. Almost all the VIs take in origin and I can change 1 origin control and everything still lines up.
• What I was most proud of
  • The design and build along with the slide interface where it is dependent on the global position of the mouse.
  • I milled the base out of a solid block of aluminum, squaring up face milling it, drilling and tapping it. I made the metal base because the previous wood base while being already wide would have to be much wider as I was making arm taller so it stops smacking into the ground.
  • I was also really proud of the first arm link design, I was inspired by the design of stained glass windows in churches. I used different colors of acrylic and specifically got a gel version of super glue to allow it to more easily bridge gaps and create strong hold.
• What took a while (was tough)
  • Keeping track of the different values going in and out of the different vis was really hard. Also I attempted to make a conditional interpolation VI, that would interpolate path to a different degree depending on difference