Yahboom Robot Arm Kit 6DOF for Raspberry Pi 5 AI Programmable Electronic DIY Robot Hand Building with Camera for Adults ROS Open Source (RPI-DOFBOT-Pi 5-8GB)

The media could not be loaded. Always excited when Yahboom comes out with a new Raspberry Pi kit as I buy them all. But this is the one I've been asking about for years. Although I enjoy the assembly (like building blocks for big kids) this one comes with only a small amount of assembly required. The arm itself comes assembled as they felt it might be too complicated for their intended audience. You just have to mount it and the boards to the base. As the kit is intended for either NANO or Pi half the parts shown in my photo are extras :) which are always nice to have when you build as much as I do.The documentation is straight forward and easy to follow. And as with all recent kits there is already a YouTube video that covers every step of assembly. That demonstration provides exceptional clarity for anything in the documentation that you may have trouble with.As with all their kits there is a wealth of information, tutorials, sample code, and applications for the Dofbot on their site. The phone app is surprisingly feature rich. Lots of different ways to interact and experiment with the arm already programmed. Including gesture and color recognition via the included camera. Plenty of Python code samples to get you started with your own applications also.There are a couple of new things in this kit which are nice improvements. A micro sdcard is included that has the Pi image already installed and ready to run. The Pi image responds to a button press on the main board by putting it into a WiFi learning mode which uses the camera to read a QR code generated by the app. They also included their Pi RGB Hat which is a colorful fan with an attached multi-line display. Very helpful as it shows the current IP address of the Pi when connected to a network.This immediately became my favorite robot. :) Highly recommended.

The build quality of the robotic arm is excellent. The included Nvidia jetson jetpack software worked fine but the mobile app is tricky. If they can just include a clean sdk I think this would be one of the best robotic arm starter kits on the market.

Bought the RPi version of this arm kit. The capability, movement, controllability and quality of the arm are excellent. The assembly difficulty is reasonable for a kit of this complexity. I call it "next-step" because this is much more than a basic entry-level robot arm; this is the kind of kit you want when your plan is to move up to something more capable and sophisticated, without spending thousands of $'s. Given the integration with RPi-hosted tools like OpenCV and ROS, there's a lot of intelligence available to this system. We have been using it, but not long enough to comment on long-term durability of the mechanisms -- but build quality appears good enough that I'm not expecting any problems.

Update:I just returned it because it went totally crazy and started flinging itself around violently when I tried to move some of the servos with the PC app or Android app. Booting from the original U-Disk didn't solve the issues.I purchased this without the Nano, because I already had a Waveshare Jetson Nano Dev. Kit. A friend purchased one at the same time with the Yahboom Jetson Nano included.When I first unpacked and assembled this I anticipated that I would be giving it a 5 star rating, however after working for over two weeks, I have some functions of the arm working, but I still don't have all functions working as described. Therefore I am giving it a 2 star rating.It is obviously very well built, and it came packaged in a way that made it very easy to assemble. The small parts were packaged in bags that were numbered to correspond to numbers on the instructions, which made assembly easier. Yahboom even provides a webpage with a great deal of documentation along with several tutorials. I was initially very impressed with the documentation on the website, but I have become disappointed with the information provided on the website.It is a fact of life that we usually learn more when things don’t work as planned than when they do. I bought this in order to learn, and this has given me many, many more “learning opportunities” (AKA. issues to be resolved) than I ever anticipated. For me, the issues are a bonus, but for others the issues could be a real drawback.The issues I found are mainly with the documentation and lack of updated software online that can be downloaded and installed. I have found some of the documentation on their webpage to be confusing and even inaccurate. My arm came with a U-Disk containing Version 1.0.1 of their software released in 2022, while my friend's came with a U-Disk containing Version 1.0.7, released in 2024. Even with the help of X’s Grok3 AI, I haven’t been able to find any place where I can download the most current version of Yahboom’s software to use with my robot arm.Even with the issues I described above, it will serve my purposes satisfactorily, but that might not be the case for anyone expecting it to work as described out of the box.

I spent a whole day to assemble the hardware and s/w and everything works as claimed. I went thru some bumps during the setup like due to the camera focus, I failed to scan the Wifi QR code in the beginning, and some user here helped me with the power supply cable which is not typical. Also I installed JupyterLab, ssh into the Jetson board to start the real work and it's fun. The only thing can be improved is the tutorial which assumes prior cross functional knowledge. I ended up searching the vendor's Chinese tutorial which is much easier for beginners.

The only issue with this product I found was the camera is very cheap, I had to replace it with my ownit would be good if they could release the sample android app , so you need to build from scratchThanks

Have purchased robotic arms from this company before with great results. However this product came with very unintelligible instructions in English - they often refer to a youtube video that doesn't hit all the specifics (like orientation, where certain plug-ins go, and the bluetooth card insertion). I could never get this arm to work with the iPhone App.