Dobot Magician Lite

IDeATe has one Dobot Magician Lite available for project use. This small robot arm is designed for K-12 education. It features three degrees of freedom and an optional fourth freedom in the modular end effectors. The joints are the base Z rotation, shoulder Y rotation, elbow Y rotation, and an end tool Z rotation. However, the arm design includes a linkage which couples joints such that the end tool axis is always vertical. The maximum payload is 250 grams.

A Webots simulation of the robot including the linkages is available in the simulation section of the course site at Dobot Magician Lite. The model page includes further discussion of the arm kinematics.

Dobot Programming

Since this robot is intended for a K-12 audience, Dobot provides a graphical programming system based on Scratch. However, our preferred control programming approach is to use a third-party pydobot Python package to issue robot commands from a laptop Python system.

The package can be installed from the command line using pip:

pip install pydobot