We have released the the BCN3D Moveo, a fully OpenSource 3D printed Robot Arm!
BCN3D Technologies keeps taking important steps in order to achieve his goal of bringing the digital manufacturing technology to everyone. In this occasion we are presenting the BCN3D Moveo, a robotic arm design from scratch and developed by our engineers in collaboration with the Departament d’Ensenyament from the Generalitat de Catalunya. Its structure is fully printed using additive manufacturing technologies and its electronics are controlled by the software Arduino. It has a Marlin based firmware developed for robot arms with steppers by Zortrax. The BCN3D Moveo has 5 axis.
Moveo, fully functional nowadays, has been born, as all the BCN3D Technologies products, with an open and educational wish.
Download the BCN3D Moveo CAD files, the STL files, the assembly and user manual and the Bill of Materials on our Github: https://github.com/BCN3D
Well done, BCN3D! This is the exactly how open source/hardware - which I have dubbed “Economy 2.0” - should work. Design great products, and advertise them by designing great things to make with your products, and share everything you know. I would absolutely love to make one of these, but it’s probably not going to happen, sadly.
I hope you manage to sell some of these as well, not just your printers!
@Dani_Epstein thanks! We have just sold 15 of them in order to fund the project. We do not plan to sell kits. We just want the community enjoy and develop it
I’m very pleased you succeeded in covering the project costs. I look forward to seeing what the community does with this, and hope this has a great impact on sales of your printers as well.
That’s an impressive piece of kit! Just for grins and gargoyles, I downloaded the BOM and ran into a small snag. Stepper nema 17 R 1:5 doesn’t return any really useful sources. Am I using wrong terminology?
Is there or will there be a forum on the BCN3D site for people interested in building this?
Yeah, the instructions are a bit lacking, especially in the wiring area and the BOM. For example, the design requires 6 stepper motors/drivers but is supposed to run on a RAMPS v1.4 which has only 5 drivers. I’m considering trying to make a board that sits on top of an RPI and handles the actual stepper signals so I can just use memory mapping or something and avoid the ramps altogether.
The BOM also talks about 2 different power supplies, so I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work either. Can you expand the wiring section? I’m also not sure what the wooden base is supposed to look like. I definitely look forward to the sub forum. It looks like it would be fun to build. I’m currently pricing out the components to see how much it would cost. This would be the perfect thing for someone to start selling kits for.
@Justin_Nesselrotte if your want to offload the timing, did you check out the chip user interface the Sparkfun AutoDriver? I think it was the L6470. SPI, Daisy chained, takes position values instead of step+dir.
@Justin_Nesselrotte Did you ever get any cost figured out? I am very interested in building one with my students, but have not gotten into the BOM too heavily yet.
It’s not super well documented especially the electronic sections and I didn’t see any way for the arm to figure out where it was on startup but the motors alone are going to cost you a couple hundred at least. I didn’t break down the full bom but I broke it down enough to know I didn’t want to invest in that right now.
