After some experimenting, he came up with a smooth moving robot arm with four steppers controlled from an Arduino Mega and A4988 stepper motor drivers.

That’s the idea behind [BetaChecker’s] two-axis stepper motor, which looks like it has a lot of potential for some interesting applications.

Building the Balancing Robot Building a balancing robot involves several steps, starting with assembling the hardware. The Arduino Pro Mini is connected to the MPU-6050 sensor and the stepper motors.

Using two stepper motors, the camera points the sensor at every “pixel” within the photo and records what it sees. It uses these values to “paint” a picture of whats in front of it!” ...

[Part 1 begins a look at how to interface with some common robotics-type sensors and actuators, and how these can be tied into an example system (in this case, the author's E-2 Autonomous Submarine ...