[Tazer] built a small desktop-sized robotic arm, and it was more or less functional. However, he wanted to improve its ability to pick things up, and attaching a pneumatic gripper seemed like the perfect way to achieve that. Thus began the build!

The concept of [Tazer]’s pneumatic gripper is simple enough. When the pliable silicone gripper is filled with air, the back half is free to expand, while the inner section is limited in its expansion thanks to fabric included in the structure. This causes the gripper to deform in such a way that it folds around as it fills with air, which lets it pick up objects. [Tazer] designed the gripper so that that could be cast in silicone using 3D printed molds. It’s paired with a 3D printed manifold which delivers air to open and close the gripper as needed. Mounted on the end of [Tazer]’s robotic arm, it’s capable of lifting small objects quite well.

It’s a fun build, particularly for the lovely sounds of silicone parts being ripped out of their 3D printed molds. Proper ASMR grade stuff, here. We’ve also seen some other great work on pneumatic robot grippers over the years.

In this series of 23 YouTube videos [Rich] puts the AMD Zynq-7000 SoC through its paces by building a development board from the ground up to host it along with its peripherals. The Zynq is part FPGA and part CPU, and while it has been around for a while, we don’t see nearly as many projects about it as we’d like.

Rich covers everything from the power system to HDMI, USB, DDR RAM, and everything in between. By the end, he’s able to boot PetaLinux.

The Zynq SoC includes an ARM Cortex-A9 Based APU and an Artix-7 FPGA (or a Kintex-7 FPGA on higher models). In case you missed it, Xilinx was recently acquired by AMD, which is why you might have remembered this as a Xilinx part.

We’ve heard from [Rich] before. Back in 2021 we saw his Arduino Brings USB Mouse To Homebrew Computer. Don’t miss his follow-up playlist: Building on my Zynq-7000 in which he takes his Zynq-7000 board even further.

If you’re interested in FPGA technology but need something more easy going to get you started, be sure to check out how to build a 6809 CPU on an FPGA. Or, if you need something even simpler, report for boot camp.

Thanks to [Alex] for the tip!