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

Let me preface with... I've been a tinker'er, gadget geek, etc my entire life. Played with some toy robot stuff a few years back, before the whole maker, STEM, 3d printing, arduino, rasp pi, etc craze and this stuff became affordable. A mid life career change and the quest to always be learning new stuff led me to order this xArm. This review will be just some notes from my build that may help others. -Items are packaged well -out of the entire kit, only found 1 bad item (so far anyway), one of the acorn nuts for the suction cups wasn't threaded, minor issue, found another nut in my junk box. -when you start you build, take the bag of screws and sort them all by size into piles -I had the lewansoul website pulled up on my monitor with the large photo of xArm during my build for reference -watch the youtube build video in it's entirety before starting your build, just to get an idea of what you'll be doing, then build as you watch and pause the next round. The video is VERY good. -watch the wiring video before you start also!! and note where the short and long cables go. I would recommend plugging the proper cables into the servos as your are building, if you wait till it's all assembled it can be tough to get the connectors in -all the arm servos basically end up installed the same direction, the output shaft will be on the same, and the cable connectors will on be on the other side -when you get to the round aluminum cylinders and adding the brackets, the larger cylinder goes closer to the base of the unit, you can kinda see this when looking at the large web photos -as someone mentioned the servos are numbers 1 through 6 from the gripper towards the base -the servos come out of the box all centered, so don't turn the shafts at all, until they are mounted square to the brackets -there was no directions on how or where to install the control board, but's is pretty self explanatory by looking at the photos and parts you have left at that point, just use the screws that are left, and the plastic standoffs -I was unable to connect to the xArm with my bluetooth phone at first, I tried a different tablet and it worked ok, so I uninstalled the app, and reinstalled on my phone, then it worked fine. This may have something to do with permissions, as I denied permission to 'phone location' at first, and allowed it the second install. Hey Lewansoul, why do you need permission to my location with this app??? -Check your servo wiring when complete and make sure the routing doesn't bind up, or get pinched at the servo travel limits, use the included plastic clips to help as/where needed. -I cut some black foam weather stripping and installed it on my gripper to help it hold small plastic parts You don't need anything else to operate this arm, everything needed for basic operation is included in the box. You can manually move the arm, and program in an 'action' with just the 2 buttons on the control board. If you use the PC software to do the same thing, then you can go back and tweak your 'action' to make it more accurate. I'm looking forward to digging into the add on kit, and get an arduino hooked up to start working on my own code. Yes you can buy an arm kit for cheaper, but the fact that everything is included here in one box to get going, it has the serial servos with feedback, and I love the blue anodizing. I haven't found anything to deduct from it's 5 star status. For now, great job Lewansoul... I'll try to remember to update my review after I have more time with this, and dig into the add on kit.

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.

Contrary to what the manufacturer claims, this is a 5 axis arm. The fact that it has 6 servos does not make it a 6 axis robot. The 6th servo motor on this arm controls the gripper, commonly known as the end effector in the robotics world. A true 6 axis robot has an additional axis of rotation between axis 3 and 4. This is similar to the forearm of a human arm being able to rotate so the palm of your hand is able to face up or down. Search for 6 axis robot videos and you'll see what I mean. A minor point, but the naming of the axes on a multi axis device always begins at the base of the robot. Axis 1 is the base of the robot and the joint at the end of the arm is axis 5. This is true regardless of whether you're talking about a 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 axis device. How do I know this? I wrote software for SCARA and 6 axis industrial robots for 18 years before I retired. That said, this is a decent toy. You can learn the basics of robotics using it. The manufacturer claims their control software runs on iOS and macOS. Be aware that you must have a M1 or greater Mac to load the software. It will not install on an Intel Mac. This is not mentioned anywhere in Hiwonder documentation. You will only find out once you go the the app store and try to install the app. Overall documentation is poor for this device. The servo motors have an input side and an output side. Their description of setting up the arm call both ends servos, when the input side is actually an encoder. An encoder supplies feedback to the controller telling the position of the motor. Don't expect smooth movements of the arm. Depending on how much the arm is extended (their joints 2 and 3). The further you try to reach for and object, the more jerky movements become. The motors are too heavy and contribute to instability. It would be better to use a pneumatic actuator for the gripper instead of a heavy motor. I bought this for my grandson who is 5 years old. After putting it together and operating it I came to the conclusion that it wasn't suitable for a child that age. He would surely damage it in no time. Be aware of this before you purchase it. Regards, Redwingz

This was my first experience with a robotic device. I wanted to see how versatile this product could perform. I first used the PC software that was downloaded from Lewansoul, which allowed me to "program" each of the servo's positions and action time. They call this "action groups". You can move the arm to a specific position either manually or using their software, and have it read the angle which puts a value of each of the 6 servo positions as an entry into a table. The table then is used like a program, starting from the first row downward executing each action with a specific time you set. It actually works quite well, and is somewhat precise in positioning the arm repeated times. Each servo has a precision of 0.24 degrees. If you do the geometry calculation, the variance at the full arm's length (approx 14") comes out about 0.058" or about 147 microns. For individual joints, at a distance of 1", results in an accuracy of 0.004" (or 10 microns). With this type of precision, you can do some fun experiments. I had it pick up a washer and had it drop it on a bolt. I could not take a nut and put it on a bolt, though I could have it thread the nut if it was on the bolt. I also had it "mix" a drink by picking up various plastic cups and pouring them into a glass, then shake the glass. I next hooked it up to a Arduino board and wanted to use the arm's controller for secondary programming. After some initial communications issues, which were fixed by Lewansoul providing the correct library for the Arduino sketch program, I was able to have it do some maneuvers and call stored action groups that were downloaded to the controller board from the PC software. As this is a new product for Lewansoul, I found it missing some documentation on the assembly instructions and certain feature operations, and after contacting their support, provided me with what I needed to know. It took me about 4 hours to build the X-arm. Much of the time was sorting out the numerous screws and while they have an excellent animated video showing how to construct the arm, I found myself trying to figure out what metric screw size was what in the kit. They should have a picture of each screw size, so you can match it up to the size you use for the assembly. The component list was incomplete, and it took a while to figure out where everything belongs. Aside from that, the assembly went quite well. In the video's, you'll see I put some soft putty on the edge of the grabber, so it does not slip out of the grasp. Also, if the servo tightens too much with bare metal, for some reason the servo does not want to release the grip. I have to ask Lewansoul about this behavior. I will be doing more "experiments" with the Arduino board, to give the X-arm more intelligent tasks. I will report back in the future with what I was able to accomplish.

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.

This robot arm is potentially so cool, but I'm not done building it yet, and I'm already a little disappointed. First of all, the box doesn't include instructions of any kind - not even a slip of paper saying "Visit this website for a PDF". Eventually I did find a PDF manual online, but the parts list doesn't quite match the parts in my kit, and I suspect it's for a previous version of the arm. In any case, the aluminum parts generally seem okay, and sturdy enough, but some of the screw holes don't perfectly align, and in my case some of the parts don't quite match what the pictures show. For example, the two "bottom bracket plates" that should be identical, one of them has threaded holes. Other parts, like the "big plastic column" and "small plastic column", the pictures don't match the instructions, and it's unclear exactly how to put it together - am I really supposed to screw a 3 cm long screw with tiny threads all the way through the brass threads in the columns? Or can I skip all of the turning and put the screws through the open space in the column? The motors all have stickers with ID numbers on them, but the instructions don't mention the ID number, and the pictures don't show the IDs, either. It's not the end of the world, just pay close attention to the "servo horns" (as the instructions call them). The number and size of screws is bewildering. There are well over 100 screws in no fewer than 10 sizes. And that doesn't include the servo motor screws that need to be removed and re-screwed. A number of the screws are "self-tapping" and dig into the plastic parts - not great for re-usability. The "screw list" in the assembly instruction PDF I found don't quite match the screws in my kit, but they match well enough that I can make educated guesses that seem to be working so far. The screw driver included in the kit is a joke - I can't imagine unscrewing the servos with such a large driver. You definitely want to use a precision screwdriver kit. Some of the tolerances seem a little tight. I guess it's okay for a toy, but it in a few cases I've had to stop and double check that it's actually the right way to put it together. The box says "Ages 8+", but I find that a little hard to believe with the number of tiny parts and the amount of intricate, poorly documented assembly required. With the hardware this rough around the edges, I'm bracing myself for the software, and I'll update the review when I get to that part.

It's a birthday present for a 10-year-old boy. I think it would work well as a present for all the way up to 15-year-olds. He's very good with building other things (graduated from Legos), so he's experienced. The assembly instructions were in video format, not something he's used to. But it's workable and complete. He probably could not have finished it all by himself. Needed adult supervision and perhaps sometimes a little helping hand, but not much more than that. We had to play and pause the video many times to get through it. Once assembled, we tested it using the (included) PS2-style remote controller. He was excited to say the least when it worked. Controlling it can be done in one of 3 ways: the remote controller via bluetooth, using tablet (ios/anroid app) via bluetooth, or a Windows PC over USB. When we got the first program to work, it was super ecstatic high-five time. Overall, it was a very educational experience. Well worth the money and time. If your kids have any interest in STEM or robotics, then this is a must. That said, it's not perfect. Here are the issues that we've encountered. 1) The assembly instructions were not clear about the placement of the base bearing subassembly (including the bottom servo, bearings and the associated pieces). It's tricky to get it right because the available turning arc of the servo may or may not match the turning limiters of the metal plates. It's trial-and-error. We had to partially disassemble it a couple times to get it right. That's the reason for the 1 star being deducted in the easy-to-assemble category. 2) That bottom servo had failed one time. However, I'd like to point out that the seller's level of support was excellent. They were able to properly diagnose the issue and send out a replacement unit quickly. While I took 1 star off for sturdiness because of this, I still gave it 5 stars for the overall experience with no reservation. 3) this is not so much a complain but a wishlist -- the tablet app and the PC software are very different. They do different things. Also, the PC app was triggering all kinds of malware warnings from Windows. Need to get that stuff signed better.

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)