Looking for some place to buy in Italy or Europe

  Via Valenzani, 12
00044 Frascati, Rome
Italy
Tel: +39.329.61.68.972

Thanks Donald!!


Valenzani, 12

I do; I wrote a review of it here:

  <http://www.strout.net/info/robotics/reviews/OWI-arm.html>

HTH,
- Joe

Thanks all!
All help is much appreciated.

Regards,
Mecha

I used to have the toy owi arm. Remember it is only
a toy and is slow with limited strength. I made my
own interface to the parallel port of a PC. The
control panel that can be bought for the arm was
for some reason expensive for what you got and as
it was to be computer controlled I knew i could
build my own interface for a fraction of the price.

I put an old monochrome quick cam camera just after
the elbow on a bent aluminum strip pointing toward
the gripper so it could "see" what it was going to
pick up.

I made it move a little faster by doubling the voltage
to the motors (6 volts instead of 3 volts) but it was
still very slow.

I used POTS on the shoulder and elbow joints and read
them via the games port. The wrist does not bend only
rotate. I didn't use the rotation keeping the gripper
fingers horizontal with the table. I had intended to
use it to "play" with some children's blocks.

I also used limit switches for the shoulder and elbow
using the fire buttons on the game port. The camera
would provide information as to what direction the
arm had rotated to.

One problem was the hand didn't have any "feeling".
Without touch manipulating an object purely by vision
is difficult. So adding button switches and whiskers to
the arm would be a good idea. Vision is ok to find
and identify an object but we rely mostly on touch to
actually manipulate an object.

The monochrome camera used a second parallel port to
input images to the PC program.

If I ever wanted to play with a robotic arm in the
future I would build my own using hydraulics for speed
and strength so it could actually do useful things.

--
JC