# Faze4 — 6-Axis Cycloidal Robot Arm Faze4 is a full-size 6-DOF desktop industrial-style robot arm, designed by **Petar Crnjak** and released by **Source Robotics**. It uses **cycloidal reducers** on all major joints (instead of the usual harmonic drives or belts), which gives it high payload capacity, near-zero backlash, and a noticeably beefier feel than a typical hobby arm. ## What it is - 6 rotational joints (classic industrial arm kinematics) - Cycloidal reducers on joints 1–4 - NEMA 23 and NEMA 17 steppers with closed-loop encoder feedback - Custom distribution PCB that fans out from a single controller to all joint drivers - ~1000 parts total, roughly 15 kg assembled - Work envelope ~650 mm reach ## What it does Faze4 lives in the "aspirational build" slot on this catalog. It's not a weekend project — it's a multi-week build with real machining decisions, bearings to press, and PCBs to populate. What you get at the end is a genuinely *industrial-feeling* arm that can move real weight and repeat positions accurately enough to pick and place non-trivial payloads. Typical uses the community has shown: - Pick-and-place with suction or a custom end-effector - Light pen plotting and laser marking - Educational kinematics demos (forward/inverse, Jacobians, singularities all matter here in a way they don't on a 5g gripper toy) - ROS/MoveIt integration experiments ## Cost and effort Roughly **$1000 in parts** (steppers, bearings, PCBs, fasteners, some aluminum) plus **~3 kg of filament** for the printed structure. Expect 40–80 hours of build time end-to-end. ## Printed parts Seven canonical mesh groups make up the structural skeleton: - `base_link` — stationary base housing - `rotary_base` — joint 1 rotating platform - `nadlaktica` — upper arm (joint 2 link) - `lakat` — elbow (joint 3) - `podlaktica` — forearm (joint 4) - `saka` — wrist (joints 5/6) - `hvataljka` — gripper body Each of these is itself a multi-part assembly in the full BOM (halves, endcaps, motor mounts) — the STLs attached here are the canonical collision/visualization meshes straight from the URDF. See the upstream repo for the full printable set. ## Software Firmware ships in the upstream `Faze4_test_code_1.0` tree (teensy/Arduino-style C++). The community has working ports to ROS via a separate package. The control surface exposed by this orobot program assumes a Raspberry Pi front-end talking to the arm's low-level controller over serial — see Documentation for the bridge contract. ## Attribution & license - Designer: **Petar Crnjak** / **Source Robotics** - Upstream: https://github.com/PCrnjak/PAROL6-Desktop-robot-arm *(sibling project — see Faze4 repo for this specific arm)* - Hardware license: **CERN OHL S (Strongly Reciprocal)** - Build docs: https://source-robotics.readthedocs.io/ - Community: Source Robotics Discord + Hackaday build log ## Links - Upstream repo: https://github.com/PCrnjak/Faze4-Robotic-arm - Read the Docs: https://source-robotics.readthedocs.io/ - Hackaday writeup: https://hackaday.com/tag/faze4/
Category: Arm Robots
| Part | Notes | |------|-------| | Stepper motors | 6 joints; specific models in official BOM | | Motor drivers | One per stepper | | 3D printed arm links | All structural parts printable in PLA/PETG | | Bearings | Multiple sizes per joint; sizes in BOM | | Lead screws + nuts | For linear joints | | M3/M4/M5 hardware | Bolts, nuts, heat inserts throughout | | Arduino Mega 2560 | Main control board | | CNC shield + stepper drivers | Motion control | | 24V power supply | Powers motors |