This site documents information about the Armdroid 1000 and LabVolt 5100 robotic arms.

Our Story: Someone dropped off a LabVolt 5100 at our hackerspace. They never came back. Normally, the robotic arm has an accompanying control box but ours was missing. One of our members took a look at and mapped out the circuitry. Since he is an electronics genius, he was able to figure out how to control the stepper motors through the DB9 connector on the base of the unit.

We felt that the easiest way would be to use an Arduino to send the appropriate signals to the robotic arm to control the stepper motors. We picked an Arduino Mega because of the amount of inputs and output pins that it has.

The goal is to have a keypad that can manually move the robot but also be able to save a number of arm positions and have the ability to run through the arm positions automatically. The general concept of the control pad would be as shown below.

Unfortunately, there is not a lot of information on the ‘net about unlocking the power of an Armdroid 1000 without the original control box. There is one great site I found, created by Dan Kohn, that documents how he reverse engineered and controlled his robotic arm using a regular PC: http://dankohn.info/projects/armdroid.html  Dan has board schematics, wiring diagrams and example code available on his site.