Stringman: $800 open-source room-scale cable robot
Original: Stringman, an $800 open-source room scale gripper robot
Why This Matters
Cable-driven room-scale robots at sub-$1,000 open a new price tier for home robotics labs.
Neufangled Robotics sells Stringman, a $795 open-source cable-driven gripper robot that covers an entire room using just 4 motors, carrying up to 2.2 kg with OSHWA-certified open hardware and air-gapped local AI.
Stringman is a cable-suspended gripper robot from Neufangled Robotics priced at $795. Instead of a fixed arm or mobile base, it hangs from lines anchored at ceiling corners, letting four motors cover any room between 3–10 m diagonal and 2.3–4 m tall. That geometry pays off in payload: average 1.9 kg over the entire work volume, peaking at 2.2 kg near the floor, versus roughly 0.32 kg for a comparable 7-actuator serial arm using the same DM-H6215 motors. Traverse speed is around 0.4 m/s. The robot is OSHWA-certified open source—mechanical CAD, PCBs, and control software are all published. It runs entirely air-gapped on a local Wi-Fi network; the UI is served locally and AI models run on the user's own hardware. Compute is split between a Raspberry Pi 3A+ at the anchors and a Pi Zero 2W in the gripper. Vision uses two 1080p anchor cameras and a wide-FOV 60fps gripper camera. The bill of materials is public, and the company claims roughly 1,000 hours of real-home testing accumulated so far. A Python API and MCP server enable agent-driven workflows, positioning Stringman as a lab courier between workstations.