Woodrow's First Steps

Growing bored of working with wheels, I decided my next robot project should be a biped. This is much more challenging, but also much cooler. I started looking at different robot kits online and quickly came to the conclusion that they're all really expensive, like hundreds of dollars of expensive.. The one I liked most as a starter project was Lynxmotion's BRAT Jr.

They no longer sell the Jr though, and the regular BRAT costs a little over $300 bucks for the full kit, and still $200 just for the motors and hardware without the microcontroller and board. It comes with 6 servos that go for around $12 bucks each, so if you were to remove the costs of the servos, that's still over $100 bucks just for the metal and screws! I just feel like that's a rip off and didn't feel like buying the kit (at least not for now..). I decided that I would try to build my own replica of the BRAT Jr. using my arduino for the brains and cheapo balsa wood and hot glue. Not only is it a lot cheaper, but it looks pretty cool to have a wooden robot.  Here are some pics of the building process, keep in mind this is my first time ever doing anything like this..

It's definitely far from perfect, but it's a good start.  I built a basic walking program from scratch and after a little tweaking, I am able to get him to move forward successfully, though quite awkwardly.  It's ok, he's just learning how to walk and will hopefully improve with time and practice (and me fixing the code and adjusting the body).