TeleArm / Senior Design II

Sadly due to a screw-up in how classes were scheduled, I got stuck taking a pre-Senior-Design class after my Senior-Design Class.

This was my last semester and frankly I was burnt-out from the first senior-design courses. I tried complaining to the professor and the Dean, naturally taking Senior-design and winning second-place wasn't enough to sway them; obv they wanted my money. :

I proposed upgrading the VR-library, adding features, etc; but naturally they wanted something new.

I ended up using the VR-library, the dataglove driver-design, and some machining time to build a 5-dof input device. Being super-creative, I dubbed it the telearm.

Rather than spending money on rotary-encoders and coming up with the interface-logic, I chose to use 50K potentiometers.

The joints were machined out, of ABS-plastic, on my trusty milling machine. Much like the dataglove, I ended up using the 16c74's 5-ADC-ports to read the potentiometers. One I/O port was used to read a simple button.

Rather than dealing w/ TCP/IP sockets, I just used the termio.h library to talk to the serial port and polled the arm, which returned 6 8bit values. (5 8bit adc axis values and 1 8bit value for the button)

I ended up writing a stupid simple Inverse-Kinematics library using trig to determine the point-in-space.

The VR-library provided me with the basic-rendering tools to load a model of a UniMate Puma robot.

And yes, I ended up getting an A in the class. :)