Control a robot arm via the Internet

For those interested in robotics, there is nothing more appealing in this world than a robot arm. A rover may be able to drive, but a cheap RC car can too. A robot arm, on the other hand, can do real work, like stacking blocks or moving colored balls from one bin to another. But what if you want to control that robot arm over the internet? Engineer Zero has a nice tutorial explaining exactly how to do this.

Engineer Zero started with a cheap OWI-535 "Robotic Arm Edge" kit, which is nothing more than a toy. It comes with a cheap little controller that allows the user to manually operate the arm, but that's it. To turn it into a "real" robot arm, Engineer Zero connected its five motors to an Arduino Uno board via L9110 motor drivers. This allowed them to control the robot arm from their computer and provided the possibility for other types of control.

In this case, the control Engineer Zero was interested in was remote. Not just across the room, but from anywhere in the world. They already had the Arduino hooked up to an old, cheap laptop, so they just needed a way to interact with that laptop remotely. To do this, they used a Google Chrome extension called Chrome Remote Desktop. When installed on the browsers of the local computer and the remote computer, this extension allows the remote computer to control the local computer - the remote computer being a second laptop. Engineer Zero can take this second laptop anywhere in the world with an internet connection, and he can control his robotic arm.

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