Robotic Arm for Arduino Coding Programming 6DOF Hiwonder-xArm1S STEM Educational Building Robot Arm Kits, 6 AXIS Full Metal Robotic Arm Wireless Controller/PC/App/Mouse Control Learning Robot

I bought this with some reluctance having assembled kits from China before, but the specifications, capabilities, and features for the price made me want to try it anyway. The kit was well packaged and complete. The parts were all Identified and all there. The robot arm uses the newer bus servo motors and this is great. You simply tell a motor the absolute location you want it to go and how long you want that motion to take, This helps synchronizing different motions so they can all get there at the same time. You could also issue a short vertical motion and a long fast horizontal motion to tailor the movement shape. The built in shaft encoder allows you to know exactly where you start and where you are going, without drift when you get there or apply a load. There is no need to calculate the PWM signal and know where precisely, and drift. This also allows completely closed control application. I am an English only speaker however; assembling the kit was fairly simple considering the complexity. There are good graphic video demonstrations of each step along with a running audio descriptions. All the parts fit well together and there were no extremely difficult assembly steps needed .The bus wiring made the electrical part of the assembly easy. steps. The included control board has a great amount of capability and can store several complex programs for stand alone operation or download programs from the computer. The software for running the robot on the computer is powerful and has English versions. Programming can be done on the computer with discrete commands, by learning from manual movement steps or a combination of both. The robot can also be controlled by the supplied wireless game style controller, a cell phone or a mouse. One problem developed after assembly, The manufacturer (LewanSoul) responded quickly sometimes on the same day until the obscure problem was resolved. The finished robot performs well as expected, movements were consistent and repeatable. Ray Rew

Opening up the box, all the parts were neatly packaged and undamaged. The quality of the anodization on the metal parts was surprisingly good and I liked how there was decent organization of screws and other small parts into separate bags. Assembly was pretty quick and straightforward (took a bit to get to the instructions) with no issues of fitment so QC seems to be good as well. Came with spares of most things and love the serial bus interface of all the servos, will probably switch to them for a lot of my future projects. One caveat is the included screwdriver isn't that useful since you'll need a smaller one for all the screws on the servos themselves and the cable management is a bit finicky (but way better than not having any cable management at all). After getting the arm assembled, it was pretty easy to set up with the software and get the included controller set up (which is one of the better ways to control any multi-axis robot). Overall, this is a pretty good product and can recommend if you want to get started on robotics / want to play around with a robot arm. They're still regular servo motors so the payload can't be too high but reasonable given the size (and price) of it.

TLDR: the xArm 1S is well designed and tooled hardware that works hobbled by poor to nonexistent documentation. I purchased a Hiwonder xArm 1S as a potential project for a STEM Robotics course. The purchase was recent. While I've assembled the robot and tested it using the PC program, I can.t address long-term durability beyond observations I've made so far. First the good. Everything works. Construction is solid. There are a couple of injection molded parts, but the rest are anodized aluminum. Fit and finish are generally good. A couple of parts weren't bent to a full 90deg, but I coerced them sufficiently to work. The servos are quite energetic. They are capable of tilting the base off the surface it's sitting on. I don't know if the suction cups would prevent that (update: they don't). I don't have a surface I could test it with. I will probably mount the arm directly to a board, anyway. The servos, by the way, provide feedback for closed loop control. Hardware-wise, I'd give it 5 stars. Now the bad. The printed instructions are insufficient for assembling the robot. The poor image quality hides important details. None of the steps involving servos identify which servo to use even though they are numbered and installing the correct one in the correct place is critical. The video is only marginally better. Be prepared to pause frequently. The holes for attaching the gripper were ever so slightly off requiring the screws to be threaded through. Threading on the associated nuts in a very tight space was a challenge. It gets worse. If you want a toy, then you're golden. You can use the provided game controller, the available PC app, or the available phone apps to operate the arm. If, however you want to do something more advanced, be prepared to spend considerable time searching through the internet to find sufficient details to do it. What documentation Hiwonder does provide isn't sufficient. Their "tutorials," other than the one for assembly, focus one their canned control methods. Their support for Arduino (and Arduino clones) consists of making serial interface pins available and a sparsely documented set of commands. Hiwonder could really carve out a solid niche if they made some changes. Hardware-wise, add some stamped references where specific part relationships are important. Switch to hex or Torx screws. Consider threading parts where fitting in a nut is tight. On the software side, go all in on open source. Nothing encourages a community like working examples and access to good info and a decent API. Finally, invest in sufficient quality documentation. The hardware holds much promise, but it's held back by a half-hearted attempt to provide meaningful support of the soft side of the system. I'll battle on trying to get the arm to do something interesting. That said, I'm disappointed. I wanted to like this more. Hiwonder let me down.

super

Jag använde min sommarsemester till denna robot, köpte arduino + sensorer enligt "UNO secondary development kit", och fick då lärda mig programmera. Imponerad av kvaliteten och hur skoj det var.

Après avoir passé ma commande sur Amazon, le xArm 6 DOF est arrivé très rapidement en moins de 72 h. Emballage robuste et soigné livré par transporteur. Le montage est très facile et l'aspect final très joli. Pour ce qui est du paramétrage, de la prise en main et du fonctionnement, j'ai été agréablement surpris par le soft qui est très facile d'utilisation que se soit via le PC, souris, smartphone ou encore manette de jeu. Je n'ai aucun regret pour cette achat, chère soit ... mais très intéressant avec d'énormes possibilités d'utilisations. Si vous aimez ce genre de kit à monter, alors n'hésitez surtout pas. Un grand merci à LEWANSOUL pour le xArm 6 DOF qui est impressionnant en fonctionnement.

This was the first robotic arm I bought and I'm pleasantly surprised how well it works. I chose the assembled version, then the setup was very quick and self-explanatory. With the assembled version the only thing you need to attach yourself are the 4 rubber feet which only takes a minute. Despite having no prior experience, I didn't even have to read the instructions, just downloaded the mobile app from the leaflet that comes with the device and it worked right away. Select the arm in the mobile app, press the bluetooth icon in top right to connect to it. You only need to connect the power cord to the arm and flip the black power switch to On, then the arm should light up. The mobile app layout is intuitive and easy to use. In the app you can click to create a new 'action', disable the motor, move the arm and save the action, thus stringing long sets of moves together. Can also set the time per move in milliseconds and loop the moveset infinitely. I like there's PC software too, can connect it via USB cable to PC. I'm impressed how strong and accurate it is for such a small device. It remained cool after repeating the same task thousands of times in a row. No issues with overheating. Very cool, all around great design of hardware and software, I feel like this opened up a whole new world of creativity for me. If you need to automate any repetitive manual tasks, this is an amazing tool to have. This model is especially good for gripping and lifting small objects, pulling levers, or pressing buttons.

I give 5 stars to the product: good quality and desing good software (no often the case). Minor negative: Amazon increased the price by 9euro at last buy step: NOT friendly. (bad amazon habit) There a few bugs in the assembly decriptions (but overall video for install is excellent)