During my “high school” years at the Friedrich-List Gymnasium I started to realize that I suck in non-technical courses. Luckily for me the idea of doing a extra-curricular project would not just be fun to do, but also help me to get a decent GPA.

I don’t know exactly how I found this really cool robot arm, but it stood around in one of the labs I guess. You would have to control each motor singularly via the parallel port and all you could do is “switch on for 1s” and hope that it was at the correct position in after that time. Obviously that is really not helpful at all. And so I developed some hard- and software that would allow to give high-level commands to the arm like: “Go to position 3453 with motor x”. All this with a serial port. And to top this all up I wrote a script interpreter software with nice control UIs for the PC in my at this time favorited programming language Delphi. I also spend some thoughts on protective measures such as a current delimiter so that the arm should not break if the position is not reachable.

Read the full report here. Unfortunately it is in German only.