an arduino quadruped 'spider' kit (and my own hack)

[linux-works]

from a company called 'sunfounder':



you add 4 18650 li-ion batteries and that's it, everything else is included.  the arduino shield hack is my doing - that is not part of the kit (lol).  but it comes with 2 arduino nano modules (strange, though: pl2303 chip based for usb/serial, not the ch340 and not the fake/real ftdi chips).  it runs open source code that sunfounder provides.

took me about half a day to read thru it and build it.  it went together very nicely, in fact.  you have to calibrate the legs (lol) and that was a little time consuming but it was a one-time process.

I'm doing some testing on another arduino board that is NOT in the nano form factor and so I had to throw together this adapter hack.  it works though, and I was able to do some porting/testing on that other board.

kit is about $130 and since all the parts are included and the cost was not much above the raw parts cost, I treated myself to an interesting learning toy.

[SL4P]

nice photo, not much more?
links, features, what did your mods add?

[linux-works]

vendor link:

http://www.sunfounder.com/index.php?c=showcs&id=99&model=Crawling%20Quadruped%20Robot

amazon's link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0136AS1ZG

so far, I have not done much with sunfounder's software other than download it from their site and write it to the 2 included nano arduino modules.  I'm playing with some other arduino boards and want to check their compatibility, so that was the reason for the board extension hack.

eventually I want to get into the software and customize it, but have not gotton to that point yet.  if the robot can handle more weight, I'd like to connect some sensors (prox, ping) and maybe a streaming camera.