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:
Other robots from Synthiam community
Clode's The Canadian Mars Explorer :-)
Tymtravler's Starting On Jac
fxrtst, That is a great looking robot, and an appropriate name.
Wow! Jedi master you are.
Truly fantastic work.
Thanks guys glad you like him! My son is very excited and hopefully get him into one of the videos!
This look soooooooooo cool! Looking forward to see ore of it...exciting challenge! I am sure you are gonna make it!
Geez Will, any chance you could bottle and sell some of your energy?
This guy is amazing. First impression was Darth Maul in his "dark time" after the split with Obi Wan.
Very cool!,,
Progress today! I managed to do a few color comps, of paint jobs. I got the other side of legs on, AND got the legs to stand and walk..well sorta.
Silly of me to think the EZB could handle the high current with out a brown out. So in the video below you get a few seconds and then "my battery is low, my battery is low" But that's fine as I planned on separating the power for the servos anyways, this was just to see if it would walk and to see if the PETG would hold up. It did and i'm happy! Those HDD servos ROCK!
I watched the load on the power supply goto 11 amps. That is without the additional weight load of the upper body and the battery and speakers. I'm guessing that at peak it will be 15 amps?! But its for short bursts. When walking it went from .07 to 11 amps over a few seconds at a time.
Anyways overall a great day.
First up color comps:
A little action photo assembling the other legs.
Spread out this thing is massive.....
...how massive? How about 39 inches!
...Its standing..and i dont hear the sound of fracturing plastic!
And lastly, the few moments of Gars first steps...
More to come in the next few days!
Your new robot looks amazing! Very cool work!
Thinking about chopping up my daughters fiber optic lamp to use for the 4 eyes then I can run a single blink M with fiber optics to the 4 lenses. Looks kinda cool.