Walking Robot III

So Hopper has been printed! We have LIFE...ok well partly. This past week has been all about mating, hahaha. I had no idea it could be so difficult (ok so I really should be old enough not to find mating jokes this funny, but it's late in the day, and the thesis looms ever closer). We built the assembly in solid works and promptly realized some problems. First we had made all of the holes for the crank shaft as circular even though the crank shaft on the engine is a hexagon. So we went back and had to change those.

After many fun attempts at making a hexagon out of lines, and failing miserably, our fellow classmates came across the polygon tools. This tool is awesome! It automatically makes the polygon of your choice all nicely dimensioned to itself. Then we had the fun job of smart dimensioning this hexagon to the rest of the part. It took us and Ninja quite a while to figure out exactly what was going on. But what we figured we that because this hexagon had to be dimensioned in three ways to a fixed point, we used the origin.

We then had to make the two front legs for the robot, the ones that should enable hopping. We had to free draw then because they weren't exactly a circle or a rectangle. Luckily my partner is amazing at using the spline tool. So she was very quick at making front legs. We made two sets of slightly different heights. The idea is that the longer one is for hoping while the shorter ones would just sort of propel rather than create an actual bounce in the robot.

So to create the body of the robot we did a very clever thing that actually worked! Since there is very little stress on the body, we connected the pieces holding in the engine with a puzzle piece configuration. We mad the holes smaller than the pieces, so you had to hammer them in. But it hammered very easily and fit so nicely!

So here is picture of the front legs (the non hoping ones) attached to the engine crank. Imagine the puzzle piece body attached around the engine. These were sized for a tight fit with a hexagon, so we had to slowly hammer them on. We have washers in between the legs and the engine body.

Same legs from the side view, how cute are they!!! So yea go my partner for being amazing at SPLINE tool!

So this is the complete robot (not the entire body but close to it). It has both sets of legs and the connecting engine piece. You can see that the rabbit legs (what we call the big outside legs doing the propulsion for the rabbit, is connected using the dowel pin. Again washers/bushings seperate the front leg and the engine connected on the crank shaft of the engine. 

 

In motion! 

So now we are basically trying to get the body part to work and the hopper to HOP! That is tomorrow's task!

We will add some foam to the bottom of the body piece around the engine for balance...lots of fun!

Last picture, it should show our whole idea! We have some things to do, but hopefully this will go well tomorrow!