movemaster.js

Reviving a 40 year old robot and integrating it into the JavaScript ecosystem

The Mitsubishi Movemaster EX is an industrial robot from the early 1980s. One turned up in the lab at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart, and of course the interface is quite rudimentary. I asked myself whether we can bring it to new life by creating an easy to use interface using web technologies?

The original programming environment no longer exists, but the robot still communicates over serial. I developed a server that handles that connection and a JavaScript library that exposes a simple async API. Robot movement that previously required proprietary software can now be written in a few lines:

await robot.moveTo({ x: 100, y: 50, z: 30 });

Package on NPM

The library is on NPM. It was mainly an experiment — testing whether forty-year-old hardware and modern web tooling could talk to each other without much friction. They can.

The robot can now be controlled using a modern, async JavaScript syntax — without the ancient proprietary environment it originally required.

Tested on an original robot connected to a Raspberry Pi at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart.

Tested on an original robot connected to a Raspberry Pi at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart.