bb8 droid

3 Articles

How The Hero Droid BB-8 Rolls

January 1, 2018 by 10 Comments

By now we’ve come to expect a bountiful harvest of licensed merchandise to follow every Star Wars film. This year’s crop included many flavors of BB-8 so every fan can find something to suit their taste. At the top of this food chain is a mobile interactive “Hero Droid BB-8”. For those who want to see how it works, [TheMikeSenna] cracked open his unit to feed our curiosity.

Also called “Spin Master BB-8” for the manufacturer, this toy is impressively sophisticated for its price point. The video surveyed the mechanical components inside the ball. Showing how the droid travels, and how the head articulates.

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Speed Run [James Bruton’s] Star Wars Builds

December 10, 2016 by 4 Comments

We’ve been following [James Bruton]’s builds here on Hackaday for quite a while and he has built some impressive stuff. We love how he often doesn’t cover everything up, leaving enough room to admire the working bits under the hood. Just in time for the release of the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One, [James] put together an overview of his Star Wars robot builds.

The build summary includes his R6 droid, his GNK walking droid and the third revision of his BB-8 droid. [James Bruton]’s videos have tons of detail in them over many, many parts (for example, his BB-8 R3 playlist is 15 parts and his Ultron build currently has 26 episodes and counting!)

There’s a quick overview of each of the three robot builds in this video, and it includes links to the playlists for each build for those who want more detail. This is just what you need to glimpse all of the clever design that went into these wonderfully crafted droids. And if you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out his series elastic actuators that he’s working on for the Ultron build, they give a robot some relief from rigidity.

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BB8 Star Wars Droid

Mini BB-8 Droid Made From A Sphero

April 19, 2015 by 23 Comments

Hot on the heels of discovery that the BB-8 Droid from the new Star Wars movie is real, [Christian Poulsen] has made the very own miniature version of it!

It’s a brilliantly simple hack actually. Remember the Sphero? It’s a remote controlled ball you can drive around with your phone — great fun, but surprisingly not many people have hacked it…

The ball has an internal structure that allows it to roll around with ease. Which also means it has a fixed up direction — at least inside of the ball. All [Christian] had to do was crack it open and throw a magnet on the top of the inner-assembly. He then machined the droid’s head out of foam with another magnet (or metal, we’re not too sure) and boom-bada-bing it stays in place as the ball rolls.

Stick around after the break to see some GIFs of it adorably rolling around — and into things.

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