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DynamixShield Kickstarter: Dynamixel Smart Servos + Grove Sensors

Former Member

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NeuroRobotic Technologies just launched a Kickstarter campaign for an Arduino Due shield that makes building robots faster and easier. The DynamixShield gives users the ability to control Dynamixel AX, MX and XL smart servos and regular servos, while also offering numerous connectors for modular Grove and RobotGeek sensors, all on the same board! Grove and RobotGeek are frameworks for robotics that allow you to purchase commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors and plug them in to your robot with a single cable. This lets you rapidly assemble your robot in a LegoRegistered-like fashion. Below is a list of some of the shields features.

 

  • 4 Dynamixel servo connectors.
  • Jumper control of the power source for servos, shield and Arduino.
  • 7 Digital Grove connectors.
  • 4 Analog to digital Grove connectors.
  • 2 Independent serial Grove connectors.
  • 2 Independent I2C Grove connectors.
  • 19 Digital 3-pin RobotGeek connectors.
  • 12 Analog to digital 3-pin RobotGeek connectors.
  • All of these digital lines are level shifted to 5V.
  • PTC fuses for overcurrent protection.

 

By combining the ability to control smart and regular servos with these modular COTS sensors, the DynamixShield makes it very easy to quickly build your robot. Even better though, the DynamixShield is fully open-source hardware and software! At the end of the campaign all design files will be made publicly available for others to use in their own projects. If you would like to help this project succeed, then please support this Kickstarter campaign that can be found here:

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neurorobotictech/arduino-shield-combines-smart-servos-and-plug-in-s

 

Thanks,

David

  • in reply to shabaz

    Thanks for the feedback. You are correct that the price for the smart servos adds up fast.  I am hoping that the Jetduino will do better since there is not anything out there for the Jetson TK1 like this, and the Dynamixel portion of it is more of nice add-on to the Grove and RobotGeek functionality it makes available for the Jetson, instead of one of the major driving factors. However, I am worried that it is still a really niche market. If you do not need to do GPU processing for vision or neural networks then there is not much reason to use a Jetson instead of a cheaper Raspberry Pi.

  • I think part of the problem was, like it or not, you also needed to sell the value of the Dynamixel servos too, and that is a tough proposition outside of education. So you had a hard job regardless of how good your shield was. The $44 servos might be great for toy robots but by the time you've purchased enough of them to make something, you may have spent several hundred dollars.. which puts it outside of most people's toy budget, and therefore needs a use.

     

    For a little bit more it is possible to buy semi-useful machines (such as a router) and have fun automating that, i.e. all the fun of robotics but a usable product at the end of it. I mean this engraver is perhaps (I don't know) a terrible product but comes with three stepper motors, a spindle motor and all the other bits and a controller - even if it does an awful job, it is still more useful than a bunch of the $44 servos, and the experience learned in controlling it would be more useful than the arduino+dynamixel.

  • in reply to clem57

    I am not totally sure why. Part of it may be that I am just not that good at marketing. image. However, I believe a major factor is that the market for Arduino shields is just so saturated that it is hard to compete. I primarily made this so I could include it in the Jetduino project. I thought it would be a useful product in its own right, but it looks like there is just not enough demand for it.