Close

The Build

A project log for Search for a four servo walking robot

It ran away after a heated discussion about AVR vs Pic. If you've seen it please tell it I'm so sorry, and that I miss it so much.

x86-fanboyx86 FanBoy 06/01/2016 at 11:070 Comments

So let's just dive into it. Here's how the build of the first unit went.

I ordered 9 gram and 3.7 gram servos, four of each. I have plans for another four servo bot design, bipedal, so I thought I'd better save the stronger servos for that one. Plus, I wanted this little guy to be as cute and small as possible.

We got 4x 3.7G servos, a mini breadboard, a Arduino Pro Micro, some scrap foam board, and a few nails. What more could you need?

IT BEGINS

First step was to peel off those pesky stickers from the servos and stick them end-to-end with hotglue:

Next, glue the servo pairs to the base of the mini breadboard. It's gonna be the core of the project:

And, just because I couldn't help myself:

Vroom Vroom!

Okay, back to serious.

Next up I separated the Positive and ground wires from the signal...

Joined all the positive and negative leads together...

And soldered on the original female connector from the servo plug. Then soldered into it a small nail, letting me connect the plugs into the breadboard as if they were male jumper leads. I try not to waste much in my projects.

I then soldered in a nail to all the female signal wires, and plugged them all into the breadboard.

I loaded up a quick program to set all the servos to their midpoint, attached the horns, and was ready to start designing the legs.

"Designed" is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, they're just rectangles in inkscape with rounded corners (apple plz no sue) a little wider than the servo horns.

With everything in place, time to glue!

And a prettier picture:

I think I'll leave this log at that, and touch on the software a bit later on.

This thing's ripe to have more stuff added, a battery would be a good start so it's not just tethered like in a boston dynamics video the whole time (see two pics above), it's also about the perfect size for a 8266. It'd be fun to get this thing hosting a webserver you could control it from, but that comes later.

Discussions