The Christmas list I gave to Carol contained mostly electronics hobby stuff, including a couple of servos and a Lynxmotion SSC-32 serial servo controller. The servo controller allows one to exercise complex control over multiple servos (32 of them with this board) via simple commands sent over a serial port.
So I had three available servos, a servo controller and an Arduino and I wanted to build a walking robot. Hmmm. I'd need to use one servo for each of the two legs but then I need a way to vary the traction of the legs so one can move forward on a return stroke while the other moves backwards on the power stroke. A moving weight should do it!
I didn't have any small hardware for attaching servos to stuff on hand. Nor did I have any good materials for the chassis. So I made the chassis out of cardboard in which I cut holes for the servos and I used thin steel craft wire to tie the servos in. I also used the wire to strap pencils to the servo horns as legs and as a boom to hold the swinging weight. Add a couple of rubber bands to hold the chassis in the desired shape and the electronics and batteries in place and viola: a humorous hack of a robot!
After a few minutes spent programming the Arduino to send the desired commands to the servo controller, it walked! Sort of.
It may not be pretty, but it's the first robot I've built completely from scratch.
Click the image to see the video.
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