Robot arm lamp

We don’t need it, but we do very much want one – it’s an engineering masterpiece, it looks great, and… what more do you need?

The lamp uses RobStride BLDC servo motors powered at 24V, connected over CAN. In case you’re not familiar with CAN, it’s a standard adopted by the automotive industry that enables devices to talk to each other without having to send all data through a central computer. In the early days of development, the robot lamp’s creator Nikolay Tyulkin controlled its movement from his Windows PC; however, he’s recently ported the software over to Raspberry Pi 5, so motor control, lighting, and animation playback (for its movements) are all now handled locally rather than needing a separate computer.

The animations are still created on a separate computer. Each joint has its own timeline with position keyframes, velocity, torque limits, and controller parameters, and finished animations are sent to the lamp and played back from there. The light itself is provided by an addressable LED ring with a 3D-printed diffuser inside the head, and the brightness and colour of the LEDs can also be programmed as part of the animations.