Day before yesterday I made the first version of the gripper. As of now I’m not very happy with it. It runs with gears at a 2:1 ratio to the servo, the fingers are straight and they don’t even align that well. It works, but it doesn’t look reliable or precise enough for what I want.

Because of that I’m planning to remake the gripper completely. The current idea is to have two servos, each directly driving one finger instead of going through a shared gear train. Hopefully this will give me better control, less backlash and easier tuning.

Today I got to the first version of the wrist. In its current form it can:

• grasp with the fingers

• rotate them

• tilt them

I’ve just started printing a lower arm piece – not the full length, but enough for initial testing with the wrist and gripper attached. I’ll print a second part later for more stability once I know the geometry actually works.

On the wiring side I realized I need better cables and proper connectors. Soldering everything directly is a terrible idea for repairability, development or any kind of iteration. I ordered a bunch of connectors and cables (AliExpress turned out to be a lot cheaper than Amazon for small parts), they should arrive in about a week.

So far the mechanical results look promising, but there is still a long way to go even just for the hardware. And the software side is going to be the real headache: coordinating joints, building a usable API on the ESP32 and maybe integrating some basic vision later.