For many of us, movies are a great source of inspiration for projects, and the Star Wars films are a gift that just keeps giving. The D-O droid featured and the Rise of Skywalker is the equivalent of an abandoned puppy, and with the help of 3D printing, [Matt Denton] has brought it to life. (Video, embedded below.)

D-O is effectively a two-wheeled self-balancing robot, with two thin drive wheels on the outer edges of the main body. A wide flexible tire covers the space between the two wheels, where the electronics are housed, without actually forming part of the drive mechanism. The main drive motors are a pair of geared DC motors with encoders to allow closed-loop control down to very slow speeds. The brains of the operation is an Arduino MKR-W1010 GET on a stack that consists of a motor driver, shield, IMU shields, and prototyping shield. [Matt] did discover a design error on the motor driver board, which caused the main power switching MOSFET to burst into flames from excessive gate voltage. Fortunately he was able to work around this by simply removing the blown MOSFET and bridging the connection with a wire.

The head-on D-O is very expressive and [Matt] used four servos to control its motion, with another three to animate the three antennas on the back of its head. Getting all the mechanics to move smoothly without any slop took a few iterations to get right, and the end result looks and moves very well. Continue reading “Building D-O, The Cone Face Droid” →