DOBOT Magician Lite

Dobot unveiled the Magician Lite in Shenzhen on 15 October 2019 as the centrepiece of a K-12 teaching package rather than as a cheaper Magician. The naming invites the assumption that it is the original arm with things taken away, and the specification only partly bears that out: the Lite is indeed lighter at 2.4 kg against 3.4 kg, on a smaller 146 x 146 mm base, and its payload is halved to 250 g - but its reach is 340 mm, twenty millimetres longer than the arm it is derived from. The two arm segments are 150 mm each and repeatability is unchanged at +/-0.2 mm. Where the model genuinely gives ground is speed and environment. The three main joints top out at 300 deg/s and the tool axis at 200 deg/s, against 320 and 480 deg/s on the Magician - the tool axis is thus well under half as fast. Power draw falls from 78 W to 60 W on a 12 V 5 A supply, and the quoted working range narrows sharply to -5 to 45 C, from the -10 to 60 C of the original. Joint ranges are roomier at the base (+/-135 degrees) and at the tool (+/-145 degrees), while the two lifting joints cover 85 and 95 degrees. The safety story is the reason the model exists. Dobot presented it as carrying collision detection derived from the company's collaborative-robot work, on the argument that a teaching arm in a primary or secondary classroom is operated by someone who has never met a robot before. That is a different design brief from the original Magician, which was aimed at makers, universities and light industrial use as much as at schools. Connectivity is correspondingly simpler: a USB virtual serial port or plain serial link, with DobotStudio and the browser-based DobotLab as the programming environments, and coursework built around Scratch, Python and machine-vision exercises. Supplied heads are a pen holder, suction cups in 10 and 20 mm sizes and a soft gripper that opens to 50 mm. The Lite is also the arm that the Magician Go mobile platform is designed to carry, which turns a fixed desktop exercise into a driving one. Dobot publishes no list price; the arm is sold through education distributors, usually as part of a classroom kit.

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