I’ve been working on creating a clone of a Jason Huggins’ tapsterbot, parallel robot in my spare time . I wanted a friendly desktop robot that I could play with to prototype some computer vision applications. Jason was kind enough to open source the code, the BOM, and and all of the design files in a handy github repo. To build the robot I got a membership to the All Hands Active hackerspace here in Ann Arbor so I could fab the parts. All I really needed to build the robot was a 3D printer and a laser cutter. The robot has a really simple design that only requires a few nuts and bolts, three $8 servos, and an arduino for the controller. Once I got the parts it took me a little over a day to build the thing. I had a few slip-ups along the way so I wanted to collect all my knowledge in a blog post. Jason provided me with a ton of awesome photos of the robot in action so I could figure out how to piece it together. One critical component was how to correctly mount the robots arms onto the servo. Jason has provided an awesome video that shows you how to do just that. I now have everything assembled correctly and I plan to take it all apart and provide step by step instructions on how to put everything together. Currently the robot runs using node.js and I am making a python port using PyFirmata. With any luck I should have that work done within the next week and be able to show some more impressive demos. The first thing I want to do is build a path planning algorithm so I can prevent the tapsterbot from accidentally crushing its own arms or swinging into the legs that support it (I’ve already broken an arm). I’ve been reading up on the robot’s inverse kinematics, but I am not sure it lends itself to a closed form solution.