It’s an epic story of almost Hollywoodesque proportions: a crippled aerospace engineer, unable to work, fighting against adversity, and while on the edge of financial destitution, decides to build his own voice-controlled robotic arm so that can regain his grasp on humanity and life — and all for under $60, too.

Okay, so we might have made most of that up, but the developer of the robotic arm really is an aerospace engineer, he really does have a broken wrist, and he really did create a voice-controlled arm for under $60 — and better yet, he did it using an open-source operating system (Linux), a bunch of open-source tools, and of course he made all of his work open source so that you too can make your own robotic helping hand.

To begin with, you’ll need a $55 USB-controllable robotic arm from OWI (US) or Maplin (UK). Next you’ll need a computer running Linux (you could virtualize it under Windows), a microphone, the Hidden Markov Model toolkit (free), Julius speech recognition engine (free), libusb (free), and some sound-recording software (Audacity is recommended, and is free). You then need to train the speech recognition software by feeding it your voice samples (you don’t want your robotic arm responding to anyone else, right?).

Once that’s done, it’s a matter of hooking everything up, linking voice commands to their respective actions (“elbow up!”), making sure all of the files are in the right place, writing some control software to actually communicate with the USB robot arm, and… turning it on.

At this point, if you want to learn more about how it actually works, or if you want to make your own robot arm, you should read the creator’s complete tutorial. Alternatively, if you want to see how this voice-controlled robot helped return the life of this attenuated aerospace engineer back to normality, watch the video below.