“Imagine a hexapod big enough to ride around like an electric scooter. Oh yeah!
Some time back in 2016 I started on a circuitous journey to build a hexapod robot. I had stopped working for OSH Park about a year before and was working on a more “enterprisey” client project. The project was interesting enough, but I missed mucking around with electronics. I also missed my old hobby of building (and mostly crashing) electric radio controlled helicopters, which I had abandoned when my children arrived in my life for time/cost reasons.
I figured that between these various skills I had enough working knowledge to be dangerous in the area of hobby robotics. I started by printing this hexapod at the Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa - The National Library of New Zealand’s sadly discontinued 3D printing service. I bought a bunch of $3 9 gram servos from HobbyKing and set about building it. Unfortunately for me the assembled device was too small and flimsy to carry the electronics I had hoped to pack onto it, and the build tolerances were too loose to make it easy to program repeatable poses. In short I just wasn’t happy.”