Project Gargantua (or Gar)

Project:

By request, my 6 year old son wanted me to design and build him a Hexapod. So I started to whip up some designs in Zbrush and together we decided what he would look like. "Main thing he has to have dad, is an arm cannon!" So we got that. Then I thought it would be cool to have a robot kinda part of or riding the hexapod. So kinda a centaur bug/robot thingy.

First thing I had do was figure out was how big would be too big? There are alot of reasons why not to go too big, which I ignored. So from an engineering stand point, "will it walk?" is the big question. At first I thought it would be about 5 pounds, then it went to10 pounds and now it might be around 12 pounds...so again time will tell. Maybe it walks once or 2 feet then crumbles!

I sourced out the materials and batteries. Knowing this was going to be a 23 servo design, I wanted a good battery and and chose a 7600 mah lipo. Maybe it will run for 15 min underload... again untested, time will tell.

Finally I chose PETG for the print material, due to its strength. Two weeks of printing on 3 printers 24/7. There ended up being 53 individual parts.

The Motions include 18 axis for the legs, waist forward/back tilt, waist rotate, cannon arm up and down, head up and down and rotate. 23 axis in total. The body is comprised of EZ Robots micro servos and the legs and tilt are the HDD servos also from EZ.

There will be an EZB inside and camera in his chest. A Bluetooth amplified speaker system onboard will allow us to play TONS of robot sounds from BlueZone.

I will updated this project as I finish goals, but if he doesn't walk due to weight or burning out servos due to stress, I will most likely abandon this build, as the next logical step would be to move up to dynamixels, but that would require $5000 worth of servos. A bit much for a toy!

So lets get started!

Here is a final design in zbrush and keyshot

Then came the modeled parts each one 3d Printed.

Here I've started adding the axis to the body

Here I continue on with assembling the main chassis

I could only assemble one side of the legs as I am waiting on some servos and screws to arrive.

And here is my first sloppy attempt at testing motion with autopoistion: