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All Robotics

PUMA 500 – Part 1

A couple years ago I purchased a pair of old Unimation PUMA 500 robot arms from a university surplus auction. Originally built in the early 80’s I believe they are still very capable 6 degree of freedom robots. They came not working and without full controllers, and have sat untouched on a pallet in the back of the workshop since then. I am finally attempting to tackle reviving them.

Pair of PUMA 500 / 560 robots

They came with a “control box” of sorts, not original, but I believed to be part of a student project before I bought them. The robots have 125 pin cables on them that go the the box. The box then has two 50 pin ribbon cables that goes to what was probably a computer, with unknown interface cards.

Back of “control box”

Inside the control box are well labeled boards for the main board, PWM board, and H-bridge boards. The pin outs, voltages, and signals that everything runs on will need to be reverse engineered. Assuming I am able to keep the original parts.

Inside the “control box”

From what I can gather through google the arms run on brushed DC motors with built in encoders and potentiometers for velocity and position tracking. I am hoping to use arduino boards along with the ones that came in the control box to manage the output signals from the robot and generate the signals for the speed and direction. Then make a python program to send commands to the arduinos. But we shall see.