Cheap Wooden Hexapod Frame Greatly Reduces Cost

[Balline] really wanted to play with a hexapod but found the cost to be prohibitive. Being a mechanical engineer, he was able to fairly quickly come up with a stable 3 servo design that would allow him to experiment with the platform. He chose to use wood as the construction material to help reduce costs even more.  As you can see in the video after the break, his design gets around fairly well.  His cost for the whole thing, including the 3 servos, the basic stamp hobby board, the recycled batteries, and the frame, was under $100.

This is a great system to start with, though he unfairly compares the cost to the dancing ones he had seen in the past. C’mon, your bot ain’t no [Lou Vega]. It is still pretty cool though.

6 thoughts on “Cheap Wooden Hexapod Frame Greatly Reduces Cost

  1. Very nice, i like the clever geometry of the legs that allows the feet to move in a straight forward line. The offset of the swing axes. Reminds me of automobile suspension. I wonder how much computer assisted design was used.

  2. Ive seen a ride-able hexapod that uses the same arm system as this, at The University of Cape Town. It uses two levers for your hands the control the left/right legs and two connected foot pedals for the raising and lowering of the legs. Im thinking of making my own to roam the neighborhood in :)

  3. Very nice build, ingenius in it’s simplicity…but when you say it’s different i am expecting something different other than the generic hexapod platform, no matter the complexity of the framework and just because it has three servo motors does not a different hexapod make…efficient and cost effective yes, ironically, when considering the same differences in hexapods it just harkens back to: A wheel is a wheel is a wheel. Yet, still really cool.

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