The hardest part of this build is plainly getting an arm to handle breakfast foods without wrecking the table, and the maker tackles it head on. Cereal ends up scattered, the box gets knocked off the table edge, milk splashes over the bowl, and the spoon drops once feeding is done. Even with all that, the machine runs its whole routine from start to finish, mess and all. That honesty about the failures is what makes the project charming to me.
The hardware centers on a uArm robot arm with its own Arduino board, driven by servo motors with exposed wiring. A suction cup on the arm picks up objects, and the whole setup sits on a rectangular base secured with duct tape on a wooden table. The maker describes the uArm as pricy but very nice to work with, and the smoothness of the arm's movements supports that view in my eyes.
The programming is done through the arm's learning mode. A button press switches the suction cup on and off, and a recorded sequence can be replayed at any time with another press. The routine itself is tidy: the arm rotates and tips the cereal box over a bowl, then lifts and tilts the milk carton before letting go, and finally grasps a pink plastic spoon, lowers it into the bowl, and raises it to the maker's mouth while a paperback book is being read.
One thing stays unresolved. The maker is not sure whether learning mode can loop a sequence over and over, and the sequence is not stored, so it vanishes when the arm is powered down and back up. Developers are reportedly working on translating learning mode movements into Arduino code, which in my opinion would close that storage gap nicely.
Project by Simone Giertz. Watch it on their YouTube channel: