Astromech Droid

@Dave Schulpius

The servo city gearbox was a life saver for getting my dome to have both motion and position feedback. On my downtime I am designing a new frame that will use these to allow the droid to transition from 2 to 3 leg mode

@Steve G

Thank you for the kind words! Its tough to find the time with both school and work but it surely pays off when I can bring him to events like this past weekend. it only makes me want to work on the droid more lol

@Zap Brannigan

They are the teeces 3.2 logics powered by an arduino. After making my own and coding them through ARC it just made more sense to let the arduino handle the blinky lights and free up some ports and computing power for more important tasks on the v4... eek

It did look like a great event looking at your photos. It looked like a lot of fun and R7 looked right at home there.

Well, you've gone and done it. Looking at your showcase was not only inspiring me to build my own droid, I am indeed inspired, as I have just dug out some old plans I had for an R/C build I never got around to building, and purchased some materials. Work starts this week. I'm going to follow your idea of doing a buid diary which I will start tomorrow.

Thanks again for sharing your excellent work (and for helping make my wallet a little lighter, lol).

Steve.

That's cool. I was looking at the tecces set. You are a bit ahead of me so I'm going to school on your build. I know Astromech.net has a lot of build threads but there's too much noise over there to sift through it all.

@Steve G

hahaha you're so welcome! It will be the most painful yet rewarding time of your life! what materials are you going to build it from mainly?

@Zap Brannigan

every since celebration astromech.net has been super crowded and parts are even harder to come by. I think my build thread is already on the third page since posting about the dome... It can definitely be difficult to find information on there nowadays. I got my teeces lights made for me by marsprops.com. they also have a facebook page. He is a builder on the east coast and is club approved. after pricing out how much it would be to order the PCB's and lights myself it was silly to not have him make them for me. I think they were $250 shipped. I thought it seemed like a lot until i added up how much it would be to do them myself stress

Thanks. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in to a new project. I'm mostly going for an MDF build with some kind of sturdy yet flexable plastic shell, which I haven't figured out what would be the best to use yet. I see you used a styrene cover for R7, so maybe something like that.

I found a site that can build domes of different sizes HERE

@Robot-Doc My original dome that I made for my droid was actually by using a company similar to this! It worked out well for a time but the cross sectional shape started to bother me.

R2-D2's dome is actually an elliptical (egg-shaped) cross section rather than a hemisphere. I tried to make a riser for the hemisphere to get the dome height similar but it never looked quite right to me.

Now on astromech.net you can actually order an uncut styrene dome that is the proper cross section for under $100.00! If i were to start over again I would have used the styrene dome before anything else.

dome link

Aaron

@robot56.

I wanted to put a couple of questions to you if you don't mind.

First off, what is the thickness of the styrene skin you are using?

And second, what are your plans for the flaps on the main body, mainly shaping the ones that will open and close to the contours of the body? I ask because I'm trying to think of a way to have the flaps that will open and close curved to go with the body shape on my build, but can't think of a way to do it except for using a heat gun and melting them in to shape.