Being at Carnegie Mellon, I thought it was important for me to make a robot at some point before I graduated. I was interested in creating a common virtual and digital interaction–that is, an extension of a computer that could move itself and be manipulated by a person, and reflect those changes virtually.The result of this is a small desktop robot arm built from hacked read/write servos and controlled by an arduino micro-controller and serial communication from a laptop. The user can move the robot to teach it the position of keyboard keys on the computer. The robot can then re-locate those keys to verify their positions.

Source code for the arduino and processing applet:
servoBot.zip(24kb)

Desktop Robot from Eamae Mirkin on Vimeo.