Open-source mini 6-DOF arm uses 3D-printed planetary gearboxes and closed-loop PID control
blaizedsouza · x · 2026-09-19
James Gullberg has open-sourced a mini 6-DOF robotic arm driven by low-cost stepper motors, featuring custom 3D-printed split-ring planetary gearboxes and an inverted belt differential wrist with custom bearings.
The firmware is written in C for the STM32 MCU on a BTT Octopus board, achieving full closed-loop PID control via daisy-chained AS5048A encoders over SPI. The controller communicates with a Raspberry Pi 5 over CAN bus, exchanging joint targets and joint states. The GitHub repo is public and serves as a solid reference for budget robot arm builders.
More from Embodied
- DISCO distilled tree search named CoRL 2026 best-paper finalist, top 6 of 687 — yining_hong · 2026-11-04
- Berkeley's Value Forcing: enforcing Bellman consistency at every noise level for accurate RL value functions — berkeley_ai · 2026-11-04
- 22 Creative SAM 3.1 Use Cases From Meta's AI Developer Hackathon, From Wildfire Detection to Document Reassembly — Vjeux · 2026-11-04
- Ex-OpenAI robotics intern breaks down viral Astra robot-painting demo on Cerebras podcast — AccBalanced · 2026-11-04
- Embodied Agent Arena: Closed-Weight VLMs Lead All Five Robot Task Domains, Open-Weight Models Lag — Haojian Huang · 2026-11-04
- PrimeBot's PrimeSim: a generalist world model simulator trained on cross-embodiment demos — Travis Davies · 2026-11-04