MakerARM - is this REAL or too good to be true - need comments.
ZaidPirwani wrote 10/11/2015 at 05:42 • 2 pointsThis just went on KickStarter and I am wondering what are the comments of the hackaday crowd over this.?
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This just went on KickStarter and I am wondering what are the comments of the hackaday crowd over this.?
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Anything that claims to do pick-and-place but only covers the placing part will not work well as a pick-and-place. The hardest part of pick-and-place is the component feeds.
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I saw this demonstrated in person and thought the industrial design was nice, but I'd be surprised if the rigidity was enough for reliable 3d milling or consistent, small-pitch PCB engraving. The UV laser took quite a lot of time to even mark a plank of wood (and I was very nervous having a non-vented, unenclosed cutting light source in the room!), so I'm not sure how viable it is as a lasercutter. I'd worry about backlash and skipping steps - my best guess was that the steppers are driving the arms via a herringbone gear system.
Another real question is fixturing: someone buying this might be disappointed to learn they need a separate, rigid bed to hold the stock being machined.
That said, the folks I spoke with were very nice and happy to answer all my questions, and I don't think they have any malicious/scam intent - lots of cool machines start off with a v1 that I wouldn't buy ;-)
The coolest part, to me, is the potential to design one's own toolheads - I could see something like this in a design school doing cool stuff with clay-extrusion, or a gripper-arm, etc
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I'd question its ability to really be useful doing PnP, PCB milling, or 3D printing. I dunno, this kinda screams jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none.
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It's a scara arm with a bunch of attachments. That's pretty much it.
The fact that they made the attachments (a soldering iron and feeder!) is cool, but it's still *just* a scara arm, and you could do any of this by designing your own toolheads and mounting it to a normal cartesian bot.
It's not really groundbreaking, as Alex said, there's a lot of people working on this. These guys just have the investors and media contacts to turn this into a $500k kickstarter. Considering the shipping date is a year from now, you'd be better off just building a cartesian bot and building all the toolheads you want.
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cool, had seen this style arm before but didn't know they were called scara arms. the implementation of the heads and making nice software to perform all of the purported functions is the hard part of this project.
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doesn't the accuracy of such machines become less when the head is near central point.?
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Yes and no, it bodes well that they shot video of all the heads working though. Impressive product obviously, the part that I wouldn't get my hopes up for is that this will replace a nice fdm or sla 3d printer, mill, or laser cutter. It will suck comparatively. This has always been the holy grail for any category of tools, combine 10 into one. There are a bunch of people attempting it on hackaday.io. It is a hard thing to get right.
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