well hello I have a robot it's in this box uh today I'm going to build a little
tiny quadrupedal walking robot it's a Arduino based DIY kit takes about an
hour and I'm gonna have a lot of fun doing this let's see what's in the box
okay we've got some baggage
first bag we have these are all of our
servos these are Tower Pro mg90s so
these are metal gear servos pretty nice there should be eight in this kit and we
have another bag this is our Electronics kit we have a
remote so this is IR controlled there's you can hack in an app and do it from
your phone but you'd have to add a Bluetooth module to this kit what else
we got in here we got an Arduino we have a custom PCB let's let's go ahead and
actually get in here okay so we have a four cell battery Bank
our Arduino which is conveniently already mounted in our PCB every pin on
this Arduino is broken out which is quite nice and over here we have nine
Servo pins so we only need eight but you have one extra one if you want to add uh
you know an end effector or some neat little tool robot the beauty of this
being an open source kit is that the whole thing is hackable all the files
are available online and you can do whatever you want with it you can make
it your own this is a ultrasonic distance sensor so we can program the
Arduino to you know sense walls whatever you want it to do and we've got our
remote and here's the IR sensor hiding in the bag we're just going to leave
that all bagged up for now because we'll we'll need it later we have all of our
laser cut Parts slow down turbo remove masking tape from parts that takes time
we'll do that anyway oh yeah a little bit of hardware oh look at the tiny little wrench oh
it's so cute so while there is a manual it's a little small for me so uh in
advance of this I made a big manual so let's uh let's
take our first look inside we have a little a little friend to help us along
the way let's get our wood out here and
start building
so these are laser cut parts and why they mask it like this I think I brought
a tool so you can see all the smoke that comes through when you you blast with
the laser and it it can make the edges of your parts not look so nice they use
a big industrial roll of masking tape that's rather expensive in my experience
but totally worth it if you do a lot of laser cutting like I do so all these
parts are MDF oh geez this is going to take forever I
might just skip this part I think we'll do a little montage and
I'm gonna pop out all these parts and prep all the pieces and then we'll get
to assembly before I do that let me tell you about
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foreign
need to find myself more of these kits so I can build them myself like we have
a laser here I have my laser MDF is cheap and all these parts are really
cheap I always found the problem with kits like this is you build it once and
then you're like oh this is neat I'll use it for you know a week and be really
really happy with it and then it ends up on a shelf and sits around but uh with
the Advent of arduinos and all these reprogrammable little little computers
if you stop loving it you just tear it apart use the parts for other things
like these 9g servos they're ubiquitous you can use them in anything
so there are multiple different types of head so to speak so petal is in Walking
we are bipedal this is a quadruped so it
has four legs there are hexapods and octopods and it keeps going up and up
and up so this one has two degrees of freedom per leg we have a rotate right
here around this axis and then we have a lift axis that's actually going to be in
the ARM you'll see us build that a little bit later so we're a little limited compared to
some but it's enough to jog around or you know if you're just trying to build
a little kit for a kid you know you want to have a fun little hobby to sit down
for an afternoon and teach a kiddo how to you know follow instructions I mean
it's the first step and then you can get to modifying it make it your own have
fun that's my favorite part
foreign
project is actually off of a place called Tindy it's like Etsy for nerds
highly suggest it we'll have it linked down on the doobly-doo
uh the meepad was designed by Scott Pierce and he's a maker based in Idaho
who was making kits for something called the me ARM it's a very similar to this
like three degrees of freedom robotic ARM and as he was making a little money
selling these open source kits as as he was allowed to he decided he wanted to
get back and he made this lovely kit for all of us I looked back through the
history of him developing this kid and it had long gangly arms and a couple
different versions but uh here we are
with the little kit that you can get for under 100 bucks it's hard to say no to
building a robotics project for under 100 bucks like the amount of fun you'll
get out of this is definitely worth it in my opinion but we'll see we still
have to build so with all these parts cut we're ready to uh to start
assembling foreign
servos moving on what do we got next
I do believe that is leg assembly repeat this step one nine four times
and it takes more than an hour to make this thing yeah well it's what you get
for trusting the internet
Okay so we've got uh these four panels
made we're going to now make the leg
assembly
cells don't tighten these which I don't believe you want your servos to be rigid
so I'm going to keep doing that and if the preservo fails that's my fault
moving on
no no no no no
no no
Pliers are now magnetized so anytime I
try to release this nut into the slot it needs to go in it just comes back out purely The
Darkest Timeline
oh hell oh that was a bear
I've got four legs they're getting there
what a slug moving on these guys
got a random blank page in the manual for some reason body assembly there are
those pieces I didn't know what they were for oh look that same Fastener I
hate so much
last Nylock okay the number of Fasteners
fits it's a good sign
so definitely still needs to Pivot nicer than that
we're getting real close Andy I can feel it
I'm getting excited I'm starting to actually see it move too
which is kind of cool
little spider's almost there buddy I'm at the point where I'm skipping
Fasteners that I've struggled with on the other parts of this build because
not only do I think I can get away with it but also I just don't have the time
okay we've got the battery on and second to
last page we're putting in the ultrasonic sensor
which goes here and then we are ready to power on
these plugs are definitely like bigger than the pitch so they're starting to
Fan in and our final Port is eight now
there's one S9 on here so if you want to add one thing down the line you can
after your me pad is fully assembled and all the servo Mars are plugged in a
bunch of blah blah plug-in batteries uh okay I have those conveniently in my
pocket I'm gonna plug in our batteries now it lets out the Magic Smoke
I did a bad job if it works did a great job
it's not good not seeing any lighting up
hmm oh there's a power switch ah
all right all right
oh
it's definitely doing something
let's see here uh walk turn walk to his
wave to receiving me
but it's not doing anything the servos are moving
I was thinking about it
there we go okay let's try this again so uh up walk
forward nope down left right
you know what I might have done the joints a little tight that's the only thing I can think of
the I think it might be low voltage that
might be my problem okay start with
fresh batteries it's always rule one which I did not follow
good boys fresh boys oh they're still warm
very fresh
well that's slightly disappointing if you have no load on it it works just
fine I tried real hard
as far as the build goes pretty straightforward
but uh I wish it works better right out of the box it's trying so hard I'll mess
around with it a little bit later nonetheless
oh we got a wave a little tinkering I
think it'd be just fine all in all uh thanks for watching guys subscribe to
ShortCircuit and uh see you in the next one