Arm3 and Hexapod projects are now much more friendly for first time users.

The Hexapod and the Arm3 have been improved with a working context sensitive menu. the menu has a tab for moving the camera by clicking buttons. This was necessary to work with tablets and PCs with no mouse.

Hexapod

Hexapod gains a “SPIDEE” tab that lets you control the body position, walk style, and walk direction. Click forward once to start walking forward; click it again to stop; and if you click backward while walking forward it will switch to backward. All the directions behave in this way.

Check out the Hexapod Github project.

Arm3

Arm3 has a similar tab that lets you drive the robot in two ways. In Forward Kinematic mode, XYZ controls will move each of the three motors – X at the elbow, Y at the shoulder, and Z at the base. In IK mode, XYZ controls the position of the finger tip and the software figures out what to do with thte motors to put the finger tip where you want it. The gcode > Your message here and gode > hilbert curve buttons both use IK to draw patterns and messages on the table in front of the arm.

Presently both of these projects are still heavily in development, so you will will need to compile them from source with a Maven-enabled IDE like Eclipse.

Go get the Arm3 Github project.