I finally decided to try out a robot arm. I have been looking at getting one (either that or one of those biped robots) for a while. I was also looking forward to building a controller for it from scratch.
One interesting problem is how to control several servos. Most solutions end up with this octopus like controller where wires from all the servo motors snake to a single controller board. This board has multiple servo outputs. But never enough. A much better way would be to use a bus structure.
Each servo will have its own little controller. Each controller will have an input and output port. Or the other way around – it is just a bus. Each controller is connected to the next one in a daisy chain. The first one is connected to the controller and the last one has one port unused. Depending on ease of wiring, in some cases a Y cable can connect multiple controllers to a single one. This should make the wiring a lot simpler – no tangle of connections to a single controller. It also simplifies the controller - there is only one port. This is roughly how smart servos work as well.
