Robot Blog Index

  • Merry Christmas 2025

    Closing out the year with some holiday cheer! In this short video, Meca500 trims the tree as Ned (mostly) looks on. This is a simple teach-and-place method, nothing fancy. Here’s the code for the bauble placement: You can watch the video on Youtube here A big Thank You to Demonview.com for the video production!

  • Mecademic Meca 500 Diode Soldering Practice

    Having a soldering iron, a few build-a-breadboard kits, and a precision robot, it was only a matter of time before I made a robotic soldering video. In another video- Mecademic Meca 500 Diode Loading Demo – we saw how the Meca 500 had the precision and agility to pick ‘n’ place diodes with delicate, easily-bent…

  • Why Not Teach a Robot to Play a Kalimba

    Why Not Teach a Robot to Play a Kalimba

    Best of RoboFiesta – Originally published April 2024 Especially a robot with the exceptional precision & control of the Mecademic 500. This was just a short trial run, me basically playing around to see if: The first kalimba I tried is a nice basic unit with lovely tone, it’s been a lot of fun as…

  • Loadcell Project

    When you need to weigh things, repeatedly.. A rainy weekend, a load cell, a robot, and a raspberry pi all got together… ok, this is a small project that is part of a larger project that I’m doing in stages. And, keen eyes will have spotted that the unit in the image above is of…

  • Merry Christmas 2023

    The year has just flown by, and here we are in the Festive Season again. It made sense to do a skit with the robots helping Santa out by palletizing presents (which are then loaded to shipping containers which conveniently fit in Santa’s sled). OK, so to be truthful I’ve been struggling with some Ned…

  • How-To Video: The Difference TCP Makes

    TCP, or Tool Center Point, is a tool which can make your machine set-up less time-consuming by giving you the ability to re-use a set of coordinated instructions between different tools. In this video, I show how to use different TCPs to achieve the same end result with probes of different lengths. Link to Video…

  • The Hurling Video

    Playing around with TCP settings on the Mecademic one day, and this morphed into the thought that it would be fun to have a robotic sporting match to showcase this very useful function. Basketball was out (couldn’t figure out how to dribble the ball repeatably), and soccer didn’t seem practical given the lack of legs…

  • Getting to Grips with Grippers

    In many automated assembly applications, a well-thought-out custom gripper design is essential. In this article I’ll talk about the process and iterations needed to accomplish the Meca 500 Diode Load sequence in RoboFiesta’s Mecademic Meca 500 Diode Loading Demo on YouTube. Some of the things you’ll need to consider are: For a part in a…

  • Robot Valentine

    View the video on Youtube Ned has a new friend! The HiWonder Xarm is a fun little educational robot which you can buy assembled or in a kit. We thought it would be fun to see if the Xarm is repeatable enough to perform in a video alongside our Niryo Ned. It did very well…

  • Mecademic Diode Load

    With 5um repeatability, the Mecademic 500 is uniquely suited for applications requiring a high degree of precision. Prestaging of components is key, however, when using purely motion with no vision or dynamic location. The CanaKit Raspberry Pi breadboard provides a good stage for this work, which could be adapted for backloading & soldering manufacturing applications.…