killercarrot

I managed to get the little Jansen style walker up and running on radio control. Probably overloaded the central supports with a huge 5 cell AA Nicad pack, and 7 channel Rx... and indeed it did "realign" the gears, which caused a bit of skipping. However the point of the exercise was to see if it would take a radio signal, and it does. If it takes a radio signal it means I wan swap in an Arduino and use the PWM channel. On another tack I nipped down to #buildbrighton last  Thursday and with Adam's help disassembled a Dalek voice changer helmet, and stuck the sound circuitry into the head of our "real" Dalek. It works after a fashion, and flashes the dome lights too. Once I've done the hard work building the neck section, I'll strat wiring stuff up properly.

I've won an ebay auction for a Dalek Voice changer helmet, £13 for some basic dalek sounds, which I can shove in my Dalek, seems like a bargain.

I rebuilt the servo mounts and everything seems sort of sorted. There's lots of flex due to the wonky gears, but it seems to move. I think i need to add some tension springs to keep the legs pointing in the right direction, they get easily deflected. Also my birthday present has turned up: a Gakken Rhino walker

I've had trouble getting enough torque out of the tiny HS50 servos that were fitted to the walker, so last night at #BuildBrighton I added a pair of meaty old 3003's from an old antweight robot. It works, buuut I need to make some mounting brackets. Video taken on my iPod touch by Adam, who is trying for the "Bourne Identity" shakey cam effect.... but even so you can see the organic wriggle of the legs. Adam also had a bash at creating the walker mechanism using Lego mindstorms. (Originally I put the video on Vimeo, but 12 hours after uploading it's still sitting in a queue for conversion... so good old YouTube did the job)