NortHACKton

I spent another interesting weekend assembling the spider framework. It was quite the challenge because it is extremely large and trying to do it on my own our back garden just adds to the fun of it all. It went well and despite a wet day on Sunday I managed to get something up and standing on my Monday off (yay for valentines day). It is mostly solid but it has an alarming amount of twist around the vertical. I’ve tried to reduce this with some cross braces from the fist joint back to the body and I’ll need to assemble it again to see if it works. While it’s up I’d like to add the cardboard cladding to the body to see how that is going to work too. But I’m going to need a hand or two.

I’ll be taking the spider over to NSME on Sunday 20th Feb at 1pm and will be assembling it there and hopefully getting it to look a little bit like the final spider we want. If you’re in the area please drop by and lend a hand it would be most appreciated, there is plenties of screwing, measuring and cutting to be done (in cardboard and wood) so lots to keep people occupied, plus you’ll have the satisfaction of helping this project actually get to maker faire.

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

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.

Perhaps we should call this the Jonathon designs a robot competition? He has really got the hang of shapes we can build and is putting them to good use. Although I think I see some repeated parts in today’s entry from him. A 4 arm bot, proving that robots can be more versatile than humans, just by having more appendages.