LewanSoul Robotic Arm Kit 6DOF Programming Robot Arm with 5 Servo, Handle, Mechanical Claw and More, PC Software APP Control with Tutorial

When I received the LeArm kit from Amazon, I was amazed at the quality of the arm, from the heavy metal base, industrial quality ball-bearing, good servos and the very clear assembly instruction videos on the Internet. It assembles easily in a few hours. I would recommend this arm over any other robot arm for robot experimenters as it will last. I intended to write about it in my monthly column in a robotics magazine and was waiting for their version of the 5-DOF hands, another manufacturer's version of which is shown in the photo. I never received those hands from LeWanSoul. I did receive their X-Arm shown to the right in the photo and found it to also be of excellent quality. However, after a year of experimentation and demonstrations for others, I have found both of these robot arms far higher quality than any of the other robot arm kits is have tested. The LeArm uses separate 'standard' servos, each of which must be connected to a controller or Raspberry Pi or Arduino board. Depending on the position of the arm, I could manipulate almost a pound. Programming of the LeArm is fairly simple as you are dealing with standard servos that require basic pulse-width signal inputs. The X-Arm has very similar construction but you can look at both robot arms at the Amazon site and see the physical similarities and differences in the two arms. Both use the same quality ball bearing base, though the metal structure is a bit different and the gripper/claw is identical to the other. This arm uses their LX-15D intelligent serial bus servos that can be 'daisy-chained' and the final end of the three wires of the daisy chain transfers the servo's address (each servo has a number of 1 to 6) and power through the three wires. (You can see the small connector on the end of the white cable in my photo) Your microcontroller addresses each servo independently through that cable, very similar to the Robotis Dynamixel servos. The higher cost is due to the cost of the high-cost intelligent servos. I had a bit of trouble programming the arm with a RaspberryPi but soon got the hang of it. I ended up writing a bit of code to use it with Python, directly. The only issue I might say is using the tiny metric screws that were all in one bag. I found some that were too long so I used washers in mounting them to the small aluminum cylinders between the servos. One of the threaded holes in the long cylinder was a few degrees off 90 degrees so I just left the screw off. The video instructions were fine though I would have preferred a written manual. I found myself 'rewinding' the video to listen again 'what the girl really said.' I also would have liked to test their two hand models as theirs seems so much better made than the other company's hands shown in my photo. I also have their 6, 16, 24 and 32 channel servo controllers that have extensively come into use with my demonstrations. The LSC-6 controller is furnished with the LeArm and is used with the hand controller (they call it a "handle") to control the arm wirelessly. Note the receiver board in the photo of their photo of the arm. I would highly recommend the LewanSoul robotic arms and controllers and servo testers for students from high school to advanced university instruction, as well as home experimenters. Either of their servo models are well made with metal gears and have yet to fail for me. Their web site offers much material on their products, and they have been around long enough for one to find all sorts of articles about uses of the LewanSoul robot arms and controllers.

I'm surprised more people haven't reviewed this robotic arm kit. I found the kit extremely well thought out. The parts machining and anodizing are just beautiful. A very important aspect of this design is the turntable that the arm sits on. It is built using a large diameter industrial quality bearing which provides a very solid base for the arm to operate on and provide servo-controlled rotation. The servos are top quality, very smooth operation and very powerful. The gripper is pre-assembled, a nice touch, and the joint design is quite clever. LewanSoul provides excellent tutorial videos, and an extremely helpful assembly video using 3D modeling to show how things go together in sequence. Another reviewer noted the importance of sorting out all the fastener hardware, that really helped smooth the build for me. The Bluetooth connection to the free iPhone app worked great, another impressive feature of this kit, especially for the money. The PS2 controller worked fine, though I prefer the iPhone app. There is also PC interface software that is provided although I have not tried that. I'm particularly interested in connecting an Arduino to the arm and writing sketches for controlling LeArm, and Aaron at LewanSoul showed me where to find the necessary information for that. LewanSoul has been very responsive answering my questions. Oh, and check out the video for LeHand on the LewanSoul website.

After looking at the various robotic arms available, I selected the LeArm Open Source kit from Amazon. I read the various reviews and became aware of the positive and negative comments. I thought it would be a good choice for my grandsons and I to assemble and learn how to operate and program it. When the kit arrived, I started to assemble the robotic arm. I found that the instructions did not provided the details required to assemble the robotic arm. I had to go online to find more detailed instructions and watch videos to clarify how to assemble it. It required micro screwdrivers, fine pointed tweezers and alternating between the printed / online instructions and videos to assemble it. Once it was assembled, I looked forward to using the remote control to operate it. Following the instructions and videos, I was unable to pair the remote control and robotic arm servo controller. After repeated attempt as explained in the documentation, I was still unable to pair the remote to the robot control board. I contacted Hiwonder customer service and they quickly responded. They instructed me to perform the steps that I had already completed. I again tried multiple attempts to pair the remote and control board with no success. I attempted to change the mode on the control board as they recommended and was unsuccessful. I was expecting to assemble the robotic arm and start to operate with the remote / mobile phone and then learn how to program it. I was very disappointed this did not happen. The material parts are well made and customer service was responsive. The assembly instructions should be improved significantly. I have returned the robotic arm since the return period was running out. I did not want to go through an extended troubleshooting and debug process.

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