I spend a lot of time looking at old industrial equipment on Ebay. After finding and good deal and negotiating even further, I managed to purchase an old retired FANUC M-6iB robot arm. This robot was shipped to a freight dock and I picked it up in a U-Haul with some friends and dropped it off in the basement of my old office. I spent a week down there disassembling, cleaning, rewiring, and reassembling the robot’s controller.

To power the arm, I built a device that converts split-phase 240V from dryer outlets in to three-phase 240V for use with the robot’s server amplifier and power supplies. After plugging it in to a dryer outlet in my dorm building, I was able to power it up, master it, jog it around, and program it!