Month: August 2012

Hello again everyone!

First of all, we owe everyone a huge thank you – your response has been tremendous through this entire Kickstarter campaign. We hit our goal, and we’re only $2,500 away from our Performance Upgrade – woohoo! We wanted to take a minute and show you the progress we’ve made over the past month while the Kickstarter was up, and ask you to help spread the word (or perhaps up your pledge!) to help us achieve our $95,000 stretch goal.

We’ve spent the past month taking refresher welding classes at Artisan’s Asylum and getting our technique down, and then welding each of the links together. MIG welding all of the plates together to form the shapes of the links went very quickly, but we hit a snag when we started to weld on the hollow cylinders required to hold the shafts and pins necessary to tie the legs together. Our initial welding and jigging techniques resulted in misalignment of the cylinders, and we had to cut them out and try again. We now have a controlled 12 step process for carefully TIG welding the cylinders to the link bodies, and we’ve started slowly welding the final pieces on to each link. Check our progress out so far:

Continue reading Full scale leg rough fitup

Hello all, M@ here with an in-depth look at what exactly goes into assembling an unbelievable giant hexapod robot. Normally I do controls (software) and document our efforts, but today I’m helping with the physical building process.

Before I get started, let me first say what a great honor it is to have had such an amazing Kickstarter response, your faith in our project blows me away. We’re just as excited about this project as you are… it’s incredible… it’s going to be great!

Today we’re going to be looking at the thigh link. As it was delivered to us from the waterjet company our leg looked like:
Continue reading Anatomy of a Thigh Link

It’s been less than a week since we launched our Kickstarter and we are 72% funded. This is mindblowing! Thank you everyone for donating, for spreading the word, and for believing in us.

We’ve received a couple of requests about the code repository and realized we haven’t ever publicly shared the link. Presently the central repository is a collaborative sandbox and full of experimental code, we will be separating a release branch out soon. In the meantime, the link for the curious is here.

We’ve also had generous offers from remote developers who want to help. Thank you! We’ll be figuring out the right way to incorporate public contributions as we clean up the repository, stay tuned.

Heightmapped terrain is now supported in the simulator. This will let us simulate much more complex and interesting situations than we could previously. Here’s a short demo of what that looks like with Stompy walking blindly forward. The ground is red in honor of the Mars landing.

Continue reading Public link to the codebase, leg fitup

After months in the making, the day of our Kickstarter is finally here! Over the next 30 days we need to raise $65,000 to construct our designs and help take indie robotics to the next level.

So to all of our readers who are ready to see Stompy move out of simulation and into the real world, please spread this link! Because you want to advance open-source robotics. Because you want to see an awesome, giant robot in a world dominated by meat-popsicles. Whatever floats your boat.

Click this. Repost this. Your support means the world to us, please spread the word. Stompy is coming.