BCN3D Technologies keeps taking important steps in order to achieve its goal of bringing digital manufacturing technology to everyone. That's why BCN3D created the BCN3D Moveo, a robotic arm designed from scratch and developed by engineers in collaboration with the Departament d’Ensenyament from the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Its structure is fully printed using additive manufacturing technologies and its electronics are controlled by Arduino software. The factory of BCN3D Sigma 3D printers has been able to manufacture a batch of them for educational purposes.
Why BCN3D Moveo
One of the worries of the Departament d’Ensenyament is the high price of the materials the students must use. Holding that in mind, an Open Source robotic arm, adaptable by the students and low-cost reproducible could take several educational itineraries: mechanical design, automatism, industrial programming, etc.
Thus, the BCN3D Moveo should allow the educational centers to enjoy a modifiable and easily accessible for the students, at a price far lower than the usual industrial equipment they used to have to acquire, with enough output for training purposes.
Once the robotic arm was designed and manufactured, an assembling and fine tuning workshop was held for 15 institutes around Catalonia, which took place in the BCN3D Technologies.
Open Source Technology: Github
As has been done with all of BCN3D developed produtcs, the BCN3D Moveo files will be available for everyone. Thanks to the platform Github, a website where users around the world share their designs, anyone will be able to obtain all the necessary information in order to assemble his own BCN3D Moveo at home.
Unlike the other BCN3D products, the Moveo won’t be commercialized. The project has been born and developed in order to make a move for the community progress starting from the Departament d’Ensenyament idea.
Nevertheless, BCN3D will provide access to all the Moveo know-how on its Github account. Users will be able to find the bill of material (BOM), where all the needed components for the assembling of the arm come detailed, as the CAD designs, so anyone will be able to modify the BCN3D Moveo design as they wish.
Furthermore, the Github users will find the STL files for the structure printing and the assembling, fine-tuning, and firmware upload manuals, which will be available both in English and Spanish. Thanks to this project motivated by the Departament d’Ensenyament and developed by BCN3D Technologies everyone will be able to fabricate their own robotic arm at home, without any specialized knowledge.