{"id":19,"date":"2008-06-11T00:15:06","date_gmt":"2008-06-11T05:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/?p=19"},"modified":"2014-05-23T01:15:42","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T05:15:42","slug":"random-doodle-spider-bot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/?p=19","title":{"rendered":"Random doodle: Spider-Bot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MechanicalI haven’t had much time to work on any of my previously-posted projects in recent weeks (or months, for that matter). I’m just finishing up work for the Computational Art<\/a> course I started in February; I did some interesting things that I’ll post here once I’ve finished the write-ups. Most notable is a small Propeller<\/a>-based robot for teaching little kids some of the key concepts of programming. At the moment, however, it’s still more of a sculpture than an interactive piece.<\/p>\n

But, on the topic of robots, I had an idea for a mechanical spider and used a little downtime at work a while back to produce a 3D sketch. I roughed out an animation to see how it worked. No, the animation to the left does not loop correctly; I’ll explain that later.<\/p>\n

Like almost all the mechanical spiders that people have been producing lately, it’s based on the brilliantly clever Klann Research and Development<\/a> design. Apart from cosmetic details, I made two small changes:<\/p>\n

First, the inner and outer pairs of legs are offset slightly; the inner legs are slightly forward. The mechanical spider design is really more crab-like than spider-like, as all the legs operate on parallel planes. Moving one set of legs forward attempts to give it a slightly more spidery feeling.<\/p>\n

Second, the motion of the leg pairs has been offset by 30 to 120 degrees. This was also an attempt to give the ‘bot a more spider-like appearance by roughly approximating the asymmetric gait of a stalking spider. I’m not sure if it’ll work in the real world. Putting the legs out of phase is what made the animation non-looping; the animation would have to be much longer to contain a looping cycle of all legs. Plus, I wasn’t very precise when it came to offsetting the motion, so I wasn’t entirely sure where the loop was going to occur, anyway.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure I like the serrated edges on the front of each leg. Most of the mechanical spiders people build seem to have them. I thought they may have a practical purpose, possibly in climbing, but I’m now fairly certain that they’re just cosmetic. But being overdone, I may try to think of something else. I’d also like to make the front and back legs somewhat different-looking; the uniformity is another feature that makes such spider designs look crabby. I might also try to make the inner and outer legs slightly different, should I actually build the monster. I think I could very probably do it; axles and spacers aside, it is designed to be constructed from flat stock of the same thickness, which I could probably laser cut at the Fab Lab in an hour. Preparing the vector files in order to do the cutting would take longer, however.<\/p>\n

But, that’s yet another project for the pile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven’t had much time to work on any of my previously-posted projects in recent weeks (or months, for that matter). I’m just finishing up work for the Computational Art course I started in February; I did some interesting things that I’ll post here once I’ve finished the write-ups. Most notable is a small Propeller-based […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[22,21,23],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":804,"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.logicalzero.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}