NortHACKton

Spent some time this week assembling the leg panels that I cut last week. This is the first time I’m able to see how big these box sections are going to be and what we actually have to transport up north for the maker faire. These are only 4 of the legs currently put together but as you can see in the other images, the sections for all 8 legs have been cut.

There is discussion with the Maker Faire people about how much space we have available. So potentially we have offered to only assemble the front half of the spider. This is appealing because all the work for this has already been done. I’ll happily go on and do the rest but there are many projects I could also be working on, so this is put on hold until we hear more.

Been a while since the last spider update, there was a pause over Christmas where I ran out of cardboard. My problems were solved with a trip to Halfords, they get lots of bicycle boxes which are all massive and double thick cardboard. I’ve started to turn these into the legs for the spider bot and have currently cut the pieces for the top two sections on all eight legs. I’ve decided to redo the first leg with this newer/nicer cardboard so all the legs will be similar.

The design for the wooden frame is also complete but it will take a little effort to assemble it and I’m still a little worried about how much weight it will have to hold and the 6.5m span between them, guess there will be another trial at some point and a test leg or two.

This evening I complete parts of the head and then tacked the parts together to see what it would all look like. Photos are still being added to the album of course.

I just noticed that I hadn’t put up a post about the leg and facial features that Phil and I made (probably 2 weeks ago now). We started with a single leg section, the smallest of the bunch and it’s still mahoosive. It’s going to be an interesting project and I suddenly realised we’re going to need a lot more cardboard. So I’m scouring Freecycle and approaching the usual suspects. What I really need though is a single large piece for the head. I really want that to be made from one as it is a nice curve. It’s 0.8 wide and 2M long, if anyone spots a suitable piece then nab it.
The photos are in the usual picassa album and a few sampled below

I received a very late entry for the robot competition from Manny Jasus this morning. He is well aware that the competition was closed but wanted me to post it up anyway, since he already worked on it. It’s a shame because this robot would work very well, towering over the people visiting the maker faire.

In other news the spider bot is still progressing nicely, I have now done all the facial features and am slowly realising the scale of this bot. It’s crazy but cool at the same time. It has got a 6.5m leg span, it will be 2m between the floor and the belly and 3m on top (10ft robot after all). The bum will be 2.5m x 2m x 2m or to put it another way, the size of a car. Still working out the finer details of getting it into a car, supporting it all when assembled and where we’re going to get the rest of the cardboard from but good progress none the less.

New photos can be found here

I feel proud to say that one of our makers was featured on instructables this week. After a busy weekend of making Matt came up with a DIY version of the wine bottle puzzle. Clearly the instructables people thought it was a good idea too and it became a featured instructable shortly after it was posted. The actual article can be found here http://www.instructables.com/id/Wine-bottle-puzzle/ and here is a piccy of it

NortHACKton met this evening at our new NSME facilities (http://www.nsme.co.uk/). The club house was pretty much perfect for what we needed, we made good use of the projector and it was nice to have tea and coffee on demand. As most of us drive and don’t drink anyway it seems to suit us well. From now on we will probably meet there twice a month, once for a project night and once for a lecture night, after the lecture we can probably retire down to the Malt shovel anyway.

Back to this evening anyway. The idea was to build a loop to drive the remote control car around. This is a precursor to any potential wipeout track we want to build for the Maker Faire. We previously had a 3D model for a loop made in paper so this evening was about scaling it up to a useable size. This was also a key factor that we needed to test in order to make the large spider bot. We used a projector to shine the pattern onto sheets of cardboard so we could draw round it and cut them out at the appropriate sizes. A team of cutters and some people drawing and we had all the bits we needed cut out and ready for sticking. More team work ensued with one man on the hot glue gun, one folding and holding tabs till the glue dried and a third pair of hands to feed the card in and we were done.

The whole project was a testament to teamwork. Many hands managed to get the whole pattern cut and assembled in 3 just hours.  The only real disappointment is that the loop was too big and the poor little car couldn’t actually complete a full loop. Time was drawing short so we bundled up the loop and stuck it in the back of the car. I will modify the loop making it smaller and we can try it again. Anyway the evening was a still a great night, and despite the lack of success I’d definitely do it again. All my photos from the evening can be found here. http://picasaweb.google.com/msraynsford/NortHACKtonLoopTheLoop

Over the weekend I hit the next goal of actually constructing that paper model to see if it would assemble correctly. There were a few minor issues and I learnt some useful things about where tabs should/shouldn’t be placed. I’ll go back and move a few things around and probably scale it up again for the next version of the paper model. The eyes were way too small to make so this version of the model is eyeless, other than that is was a very successful attempt.
Full size photos can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/msraynsford/NortHACKtonSpider# but I’ve added a teaser photobelow.

Spider Bot

The votes are in and counted and Jonathon Turners Spiderbot was the most popular of all the entries. So congratulations to him. The Spider design will make an impressive and imposing bot when scaled up to the full size and will hopefully create a talking point wherever we end up taking it.

I’ve already begun assembly and the conversion process to a paper model. For anyone that is interested in following along and working out how this will all go together you can download the paper cut from the following link. Consider this a draft, page 7 doesn’t need to be printed at all and you’ll quickly see that the boxes on page 6 are pretty wonky too. It’s still quite a good exercise in the conversion process and I already found half a dozen things I would change in the pattern from cutting out 2 parts.

https://sites.google.com/site/msraynsford/SpiderbotSeperated.pdf

Finally I’d like to say a very big thank you to all the people that entered designs into this competition, it wouldn’t have been a competition without you and stay tuned, we may have some more news for you once I’ve had a discussion with NortHACKton on Wednesday.

Thanks to all who entered into the competition, we’re going to close it as of now and we will try to get back to you all asap with the results. In the meantime perhaps you’d like to enjoy some of the other amazing robot designs that can be found here http://conceptrobots.blogspot.com/

Very last thing last night I received a competition entry from Christopher Burman. His Promo bot covers everything we requested in a bot and also encapsulates the spirit of the competition, suggesting maker type ways we could actually make it functional. A great entry here with style and design and from a technical viewpoint the extra legs for stability make it rather practical too.