I've been tinkering and refining the basic design of the shells and working out a repeatable procedure that anyone can follow.

Mark was happy to volunteer as a guinea pig to build the second generation parts blind from a template without instructions. Other than following the previous design and building a set of parts, he doesnt have any prior modelling experience. Here is the result.

Mark chose the most complicated part to begin with and piled right in.

First he printed the latest set of beta templates. They have no lettering or numbering on them and just dotted lines to indicate the folds. These he scored with a sharp point, and then cut out the parts carefully with a craft knife and a rule. You can use a pair of fine craft scissors equally well, this is what I use for the bulk of the build.

These are the instructions he used.

After a while Mark managed to produce this. Not bad for a first time attempt at Origaime, I would say that the system works.

Encouraged by the success, the other section went together smoothly I gather. Mark is using a general-purpose clear contact adhesive to glue his card. This does not wet the card and make it soggy but dries faster. It is harder to keep off your fingers than the traditional PVA that I favour. This takes longer to grab the card and softens it so I can seal edges and fill small gaps. The overall strength with either is more than adequate, so it is a matter of personal choice. Superglue also works but is not recommended, as are other types of glue.

Other parts followed...

Mark said he likes how these parts just fit together by themselves almost - the foot folds up and lines itself up as you drop it down the cone of the leg for example. This is how I'd envisioned it. The Way of Origaime means that things fit where they are supposed to either by folding or interlocking.

I've also experimented with other card out of interest. To print this, I gummed an A4 paper template to the black card before cutting and scoring. If you can buy black paper, why cant you buy white ink for your printer hmm?

Intersections

This is what is meant by Cardware being an educational system. It is a paradigm that takes minutes to learn, hours to practise, and perfect to a level where you can produce these parts from blank card as Mark has done.

A tidy exoskeleton that can be constructed cheaply and easily is only part of the story. There is also the sensory system to consider. In between redesigning the limbs, I've been trying to make the nervous system easy to construct too. After a fashion we discussed other ways of making an antenna besides sticking foil patches to the card. The layout and wiring for this became too complicated, so we looked at other topologies.

Mark has spent a good deal of time and effort tracing down grounding issues in #The Cardboard Computer - IO is my name. Due to the 'rats nest' of wiring, he needs significant decoupling to prevent misfires and false triggers in his logic chain caused by stray signals. He'd noticed it responds to the presence of his hand like a radio circuit does, and suggested using thin wire glued to card to make deliberate antennae for Cardware. What is bad for the gander is good for the goose as they say however.

This is the resulting antenna module. The generation 1 system used 1 port per patch from the MCU, so I have designed a circuit that multiplexes 8 ports into a bus. This has 5 address bits, one for each leg and one for the body, and 3 id bits so each limb has 7 distinct patches on it, as does the body.

There is no reason why the antenna cant be built to accommodate 255 distinct patches on the surface, or more by extending the bus.

The lower leg section has four of these antennae joined together to pick up motion near, and touches on, each side of the limb. There are others embedded across the shell.

I'm waiting on servos, and Mark is waiting on his system hardware before we can test it thoroughly.

If you want a complete set of templates, please ask.