Fledgling Delta Robot (Nearly) Ready for Sorting Duties

Anthony “Proto G” Garofalo has made many interesting devices, but it’d be hard to beat the delta robot that he’s currently working on. It uses a trio of very large (NEMA 34) stepper motors with a 5:1 gearbox to move a small vacuum gripper at a high speed.

An ESP32 module is used for control, along with a trio of large stepper drivers. Additionally, Garofalo shows off some nice looking buttons and knobs in the project video, one of which is a 12-position switch. He plans to use this with voltage dividers in order to feed inputs into an analog input to save I/O.

The video demonstrates the robot’s end effector moving to a horizontal position then down, simulating how it would position itself to pick up items. A Pixy vision sensor was originally on the moving part of the assembly, along with an LED ring light, but he’s now gone with a smaller gripper assembly for a better range of motion. However, it eventually turns out — there’s some discussion about marble sorting — it looks like it will be an incredible robot. Even in its unfinished state it’s certainly worth checking out:

While that video gives a good overview of the device’s functionality, you can see more on the build process on Garofalo’s YouTube page. On a related note, Charmed Labs just released the Pixy2 vision sensor, which is smaller and faster than the original — perfect for end-of-arm use?