Show HN: A 2D and 3D robot arm simulator built in Excel

#1

Post by carlkcarlk » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

Show HN: A 2D and 3D robot arm simulator built in Excel
github.com

Re: Show HN: A 2D and 3D robot arm simulator built in Excel

#2

Post by carlkcarlk » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

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Re: Show HN: A 2D and 3D robot arm simulator built in Excel

#3

Post by v9v » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

I guess you're writing it all out for educational purposes, but conventionally to describe the kinematics of a serial robot arm Denavit-Hartenberg parameters are used, which needs only 4 parameters per link.

Re: Show HN: A 2D and 3D robot arm simulator built in Excel

#4

Post by carlkcarlk » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

v9v wrote: post #3

I guess you're writing it all out for educational purposes, but conventionally to describe the kinematics of a serial robot arm Denavit-Hartenberg parameters are used, which needs only 4 parameters per link.

Interesting! I hadn't heard of DH parameters before. I worked this out from first principles starting from turtle graphics and ended up with four primitive operations: yaw, pitch, roll, and move. Not surprisingly, the parameter count comes out the same.

If I want to understand DH, I guess I'll need to add another tab to the spreadsheet.