Wooden Menace, the $57 Robot Arm

Who says you have to scape up millions of research bucks to make a working robot arm? Meet Wooden Menace, a roughly functioning robotic appendage that Chris, an enterprising craftsman at PyroElectro, put together for less than $60. Its parts are carved out of wood, and Chris connected those parts with a few servo controllers and a $10 PIC18F452 microchip processor to make this crudely functioning robotic arm that he steers with a cloned PS1 controller. After 25 hours of work and some tricky programming, we’re thinking Chris proved his point. [PyroElectro, via Make]