ARMazing! (Part Two: Dissecting and our Blue Print)
In ARMazing! (Part Two: The discovery) we found a robot call 'Mentor' by Cybernetic Application. Feedback Instrument Limited took over the manufacturing rights in Cybernetic Application but Mentor is no longer being manufactured. It was originally used for educational purposes. For this blog post we will show you whats is INSIDE mentor and what future plans we have.
Firstly, a brief acknowledgement to a blogger namely BlizBiggy who was working on another Mentor. You can follow him on here. Here is a video where he talks about his work with Mentor.
The bulk of the electronics can be found underneath Mentor. Underneath contains a control board, a transformer and an AC-DC converter.
Dissecting Mentor
The front has a set of banana sockets that was used to control external actuators and receive signals from external sensors. This machine takes power directly from the 240 volt wall socket but that won't be necessary for our project. Mentor can take its power from the DC Power Supplies found in our university laboratory.
Banana sockets and power socket
In its prime, Mentor would had been connected to a computer via some old fashion IO interface. Nowadays everything is USB. Here is a close look at the control board (below).
Control Board
Top left: Port for the adapter that
connects to the computer
Bottom left: wires connected to
the banana sockets found
in front of the robot
Right side: wires connected to the
motors and potential meters found in the robot arm
The transformer and the AC to DC converter (characterised by the massive capacitors) will be useless for us. We decided to power the robot via the DC Power Supplies we have at our university.
Top: AC-DC converter
Botom: Transformer
We took apart the casing on the arm and found potential meters and gear boxes inside. The gear boxes have very high torque ratio to transform the motor's high speed into powerful torque.
One of the gear boxes
After looking at all the parts we decided to draw up a diagram to illustrate how Mentor will fit into our project.
Interrelationship of power, Arduino, Mentor and the 3D printed Hand.
Hello, my name is danu
ReplyDeletewe have an old mentor robot (very similar to yours, a video that appears on the video), but we do not know how to connect it to a PC
can you give me schematic and arduino how to work ? (danumaldino18@gmail.com)
Help will be great.
Greetings and thanks