I have recently built a robotic arm from scratch that can pickup and move around a metal object using its electromagnet. There are 2 servos which are responsible for moving the arm’s joints and a DC motor rotates the base. To increase the torque of the base motor, a 2 gear system is used. The gears are made in 2DDesign and laser cut out of a 5mm acrylic sheet. To power the entire system, a wall socket battery charger is used that provides 5V at 1.5A. An arduino is used to control the two servos using a joystick but the DC motor and electromagnet are directly wired up to their corresponding switches. The 3 position switch at the top of the control board can make the motor move in either direction by a clever wiring technique which can be found here. The base was a solid piece of wood that had a hole drilled in the middle to accommodate the rotating base axle and another large opening was made for the DC motor.
Click here to download the code for the arduino
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