William's Workbench

My cousin works for a school and spotted something on its way to the dumpster that he thought I might like.

 

He was right. (Thanks cuz!)

That is a SCORBOT-ER 4PC teaching robot, complete with controller and a PC with SCORBOT software. It’s amazing what some people will throw away. After getting this home, cleaned up, and up on the workbench for a look I discovered there was no cable to connect the PC to the control box.

Off to the webs I go and after waiting a few weeks for back order (nobody carries weird DB cables in stock these days) I had me a cable. Oops, it doesn’t fit. What at first glance I thought was a DD-50 connector was actually an HD-62. The cable from the control box to the robot is a DD-50 and I assumed the other was the same. Lesson learned, I should have counted the pins instead of assuming.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and a shiny new HD-62 cable arrives. Plug it in, boot up the ailing old Windows 98 PC (I really need to backup that HDD…) and I have a working robot. Wow. I’m in geek heaven. Now to bolt this thing to the workbench and teach it to solder…

 

My first SCORBOT program. Pick up a block and move it.

 

A closeup of the gripper.

 

Stacking some blocks.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Electronics, Robotics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.