6 DoF Robotic Arm Controlled by Raspberry Pi

This is my personal project. So far the hardware consists of:

• Raspberry Pi 2B
• PCA9685 hat for the Pi
• Robotic arm (diymore ROT3Us) with six MG996R servos
• Separate power supplies for the Pi and the servos

Physical setup

Dependencies on RPi

sudo apt-get install python-smbus
sudo apt-get install i2c-tools # might already get installed with the above

After that, detect the 0x40 address of the PCA9685 hat:

sudo i2cdetect -y 1

For the Adafruit library, execute the following:

pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-servokit

Development dependencies for Flask server

pip3 install flask

You might also need to install the following:

pip3 install typeguard

Then, do the following:

export FLASK_APP=server/server.py
flask run

You will now see the server running. By opening localhost:5000, you can see a reply from the server.

Visualization of URDF

The kinematics/sixdof_arm.urdf file can be visualized in Foxglove Studio. To do that, install Foxglove Studio and open the file in it under "Custom layers". The model should look like the following.