One of the end effectors included with the uArm Swift Pro is a stylus which can be used with a tablet instead of a human finger, which is handy, because robots don’t have human fingers.
Over at Brinn Labs we’ve been trying to diagnose this problem we have with an iPad in a kiosk that seems to be going to a black screen. I’ve already done a few tests to diagnose it, but one of the tests I couldn’t easily do was stress test it by running through the app over and over again… enter our robot overlords!
In uArm Studio you can use a “Blockly” interface to program the movements. If you’ve used Scratch or another block-based programming interface, Blockly is one of those.
Blockly is easy to use, but can also be frustrating if you know how to write code. I wanted to walk through this exercise just using Blockly. Now for a non-coder, this is a great, easy to use interface… for someone who loves code, not so much.
And then I clicked on the Javascript view. Aha! Real code! But! You cannot edit it… it appears to be read-only, or just a rendering of the code you created using the block interface. That’s not fun.
But wait! There’s an XML view… featuring XML you’d probably never write. But the XML version is important because that’s how uArm Studio stores the file on disk… in XML format. I haven’t tried editing the XML yet to see what uArm Studio does with it, but it might be worth a try.
To be honest, I’m much more interested in the uArm Python SDK which looks like something I’d enjoy digging into. (Especially with my new-found love of Python.)
Anyway, here’s a video of the uArm Swift Pro in action touching the iPad to work through the app… and after that is a time lapse from a camera that was running over the weekend to make sure nothing went wrong.