[Greg06] started learning electronics the same way most of us did: buy a few kits, read a few tutorials, and try your hardest to put a few things together. Sound familiar? After a while, you noticed your skills started increasing, and your comfort level with different projects improved as well. Eventually, you try your hand at making your own custom projects and publishing your own tutorials.

Few are lucky to have a first-project as elaborate as [Greg06’s] quadruped robot. We don’t know about you, but for some of us, we were satisfied with blinking two LEDs instead of just one.

[Greg06’s] robot has a quadruped based, housed within a 3D printed spherical body. The legs are retractable and are actuated by tiny servo motors inside the body. [Greg06] even included an ultrasonic distance sensor for the obstacle avoidance mechanism. Honestly, if it weren’t for the ultrasonic distance sensor protruding from the spherical body, you might think that the entire robot was just a little Wiffle ball. This reminds us of another design we’ve seen before.

If that weren’t enough, the spherical head can rotate, widening the range of the ultrasonic distance sensor and obstacle avoidance mechanism. This is accomplished by attaching another servo motor to the head.

Pretty neat design if you ask us. Definitely one of the coolest quadrupeds we’ve seen.

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.

[Matt] worked on the film himself, so he based his build on a design by [Michael Baddeley], another prolific droid builder, to avoid breaching his NDA. He covers the entire development and testing process in a series of videos, and will be releasing the design files and instructions when it’s done.

While it’s yet to make its premiere, Matt Denton has already built the D-O droid from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker using a MKR WiFi 1010 for control, along with a MKR IMU Shield and a MKR Motor Carrier. 

The droid scoots around on what appears to be one large wheel, which conceals the Arduino boards as well as other electronics, batteries, and mechanical components. Denton’s wheel design is a bit more complicated mechanically than it first appears, as its split into a center section, with thin drive wheels on the side that enable differential steering.

On top, a cone-shaped head provides sounds and movement, giving the little RC D-O a ton of personality. The droid isn’t quite finished as of the video below, but given how well it works there, the end product should be amazing!

Alejandro Clavijo, together with his father Jerónimo, spent two years building the first official fan-made model of the R4-P17 Star Wars droid. For those not familiar with this family of droids, R4-P17 was the robot companion to the young Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The replica is made of aluminum and wood, and runs on four Arduino boards. Impressively, the project has also been approved by Lucasfilm, the studio behind the saga, allowing Clavijo to bring it to official Star Wars events all over the world.

Clavijo sent us a bunch photos showing R4-P17’s construction, and more can be found over on its website. As you can imagine, the robot has been a big hit, already making several appearances on TV and in a number of blogs.

When not recreating Star Wars characters, Clavijo spends his days working as an engineer and has designed controls for “clean rooms” using Arduino Uno. You can see his design–made with CATIA–on Thingiverse.

A BB-8 Builders Club has created plans for creating your own 3D printable full-size BB-8 droid.

Read more on MAKE

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