10/19/2025 1 AM - started to find out how to use media pipe and google things

I've figured out that I can use gesture recognition to be able to make the robot arm move and to have it work and also that there can be some object recognition so it can be able to grab whatever i say and tell the arm to grab. that is the rabbit hole I've been going on for the last 2-3 hours to see how viable this robot arm is. like all of the different things I can do with media pipe and all of the google resorces also like the google voice recognition. this will be a very fun challenge
to take on.

10/19/2025 11 PM - just spent the last 5 hours soldering

Today I spent several hours working on assembling the circuit boards for my project. Most of the time was spent soldering components onto the boards. It was annoying making sure every thing was looking good and that all the parts were correctly oriented.
next I'm going to check if I can run media pipe on a raspberry pi and see how horribly it would run on the old pi I've used for testing.

10/23/2025 7 PM - Made the BOM

started to work on thinking about what I would need to make this ai robot arm into a reality. ive found some pretty strong servos that can most likely lift anything that i would ever want it to. found a good enough camera that can take a good enough video for the object recognition. I'll ship it soon because its easier for me to test code and everything when I have physical electronics. Took a while to make the bom because i was seeing if all the parts would work with the AI model.

10/23/2025 8 PM - Shipped It hope it gets approved

made a cart in aliexpress and took screenshots and took screenshots for the board coming from adafruit. heres all of the cart screenshots i took. they line up pretty closely with the bom but not exactly shipping threw it off a by like ten twenty dollars.

11/7/2025 - design the base of the arm and rotation mechanism

i made the base very minimal and the base is made to use a servo and timing belt to rotate most of the way around i think that it will only be able to go 360 once and not infinitely.

11/11/2025 - modified the lower arm base and first linkage

i modified the arm linkage to have a hole through the middle to route wires more effectively and alos added a hole in the arm base so you can rout wires right under the base into the extention base for a raspberry pi or aurduino.

11/12/2025 - finished main parts of the arm

i make the upper link of the arm and the trangular thing is a connector. i made sure that all of the peices will fit together and i tryed to see if they were the best they could be for mobility.

11/14/2025 - Went looking for software for inverse kinematics to learn

I've found out that that there are more kinematics than just inverse there's forward kinematics as well which do the exact opposite. where the (x, y, x) is an input and where it ends up is the output. i want it to be go somewhere and then grab something or knock something over so i think that inverse kinematics will work best for what i need to do.

11/15/2025 - decided to re-design the arm to get from 4 DOF to 6 DOF

I am now thinking that it would be more practical if it were able to move around better and i figure that this is the best way to do so. I'm going for something similar to robotic arms found on amazon and other places on like so i hope that i can take their goods leave their bads and make an arm to fit my needs

11/17/2025 8:05 PM - re designed the arm because i had nothing better to do

I ended up designing the entire arm in a single day—mostly because I was bored and didn’t have anything else I needed to get done. It’s loosely based on a few other robotic arms I’ve seen floating around the internet, it uses stepper motors along with mostly M3 nuts and bolts to hold everything together. Some of the geometry was a pain to model, and a few parts definitely tested my patience, but overall I think it turned out really well.

I haven’t designed a gripper for the end of the arm yet, but I’m hoping to get that done tomorrow. when that’s done, I’ll put together a new BOM to go with the final design.

11/17/2025 8:43 PM - deciding if i should try and change the motors to steppers

I just was looking around for motors that i could use and these showed up and i think that it would make this arm work a lot better if i were to use stepper motors instead of servos but this is a thought not a thing to worry about right now. this is me making a different arm i found made with servos into a stronger better arm with stepper motors.

11/18/2025 - going with new steppers I found starting to redesign old arm

I've seen that these parts will be able to better hold the weight of the arm and keep the arm in a better position it can also hopefully allow the arm to have all of its joints spin almost unlimitedly. giveing it a better range of motion and more power. here is the base remodeled