May 2014
Nothing special overall but I really liked the look of Jerz’ Penny design and build of his Penny walking bot.
I had already built a three servo walker with my “White Legged Spider Monkey” but really liked how his walker looked and having just gotten my 3D printer working for the most part at the time figured it was worth a print and build. I wanted to mix up the colors a bit and printed the body and connecting rods in black and the legs in white. Yeah, I know, I already have another “White Legged Spider” kind of thing but B&W looks nice.
After I had her printed out I happened to comment in the SB that I needed to get hardware and Jerz himself said don’t worry about it and before long I had received all the screws, nuts, parts, and even a ProMini for my ProtoPenny. Very cool indeed.
Body wise this is the same a Penny. I did use a different head and mounted up two US sensors, one on a panning servo and one on a top plate and angled slightly up to potentially pickup things the lower sensor can’t see. I slapped a battery box on it’s belly, a couple LEDs behind the lower sensor, round speaker on it’s butt and called it good. Since I already had ProMini stuff, I used one of those like Jerz sent but it was a bit of a tight fit. My normal homemade undershield would not fit so I just soldered up pins to the ProMini and then made a couple of round power distribution boards mounted behind the heads using some small circular perf boards.
The bot doesn’t really do a whole lot but there’s plenty of brains there to do more. On power up it does a quick back and forth scan and then starts out in “nervous” mode. Just thought that seemed kind of cool like it’s afraid of the world. If something moves into site it will back up, otherwise it will start walking after a few seconds making some high pitched sounds based on the distance it sees. After a random time it will revert to nervous mode again and shiver a little while before proceeding to wander again.
Just a fun little build… Named it Farthing since it’s less than Penny but still worth something… I think anyhow.
And just a little “Fancy Farthing”…
