Steve the Spider — an unexpected journey
Who am I?
An always vague and open question but I’ll stick mostly to electronics. The simplest statement about me is I’m obsessed with intricate things and find beauty in all sorts of places.
I studied electronics, specifically radio electronics, which by the way doesn’t mean I made radios. Radio-electronics is the study of AC or radio electronics, or the stuff that Nikola Tesla pioneered. But then.. yes I guess I could build a radio.. But thats not the point, everything we do uses some form of radio electronics.
But now I’m a software developer. One day I figured out that I could make something electronicsy and I’d have to spend the same amount of time making it again… the clipboard for electronics is actually a clipboard and it does nothing but hold your pen and store the angry notes you write on it. Coding however I could replicate, inherit, augment and adapt what I’d already built. Things that I write in code can grow over time.
Programming is efficient, fast and very repeatable and rarely requires bandaids, icepacks or trips to the ED — if you’ve ever caught a soldering iron by the hot end or grabbed the business end of a transformer, you’ll know what I mean.
All efficiencies and 2nd degree burns aside, there’s something quite spectacular about making things in the real world where the outcomes of your “hello world” application are flashing lights, whuring motors or an LCD screen with a 4-eyed smile. Needless to say, I’ve always played with and been fascinated by electronics in my own time.
That being said, software development has done me very well in my almost 20 year career, I’ve developed websites, mobile applications, server-side systems, embedded systems and lots of fun and interesting things with all sorts of languages across all sorts of platforms.
The job interview Odecee
After working at web development agencies as a tech lead for a few years, I found myself wanting to focus on the more technical aspects of computing.
A couple of friends of mine already worked at Odecee and recommended me.
While preparing for my interview with a couple of Odecee’s chief engineers, I realised that I’ve been a tech-lead for 3 years, a mobile dev for 2 years before that and a solutions architect for a couple of years before that and an embedded developer for a while before, but no enterprise development experience… I literally had nothing to show that wasn’t boring as, irrelevant, or under NDA.
It’s often said that restriction is the fuel of creativity.
Queue Frankenbuggy
While I have a good resume, a personable attitude and I can muster a good joke when needed, I still had nothing to show which isn’t the greatest place to be.
In a few of previous jobs I developed a fault tolerant micro communications protocol that could transfer data between systems over serial streams from mobile devices and laptops to embedded electronics.
The comms protocol was initially designed to work over laser data links for security systems, IRDA for portable electronics, microwave, wifi and GPRS for remote installations — weather stations are usually in not so cool places.
The comms protocol exists in many forms at previous workplaces but the thread model, information flows and communications ideology exist in my head.
With a bunch of electronics and a cheap but great Android phone, I got started building a buggy.
I rewrote the protocol for the 5th time completely from scratch for both Android and Arduino — then I built a 4 wheel buggy. I call him frankenbuggy because he’s all gnarly and there’s cables everywhere. I have plans for future upgrades that will have him chasing my spiders with a GoPro.
Of course I did all of this and left the android phone in my jacket on my bed, because it was warm and I was an idiot… I brought everything else though, including the source code and showed it off a little, it seemed to work.
7 Weeks off and 3d printing
By the time of my interview I had already given notice at my previous job, I had a very important wedding to go to that was 6 weeks away and a week off in New Zealand planned so I had 7 weeks to kill.
Of course for an obsessive and creative person like me, thats way too much time to have to my own devices so I purchased a 3d printer, an UP! Mini that I had played with previously (mentioned in this post), downloaded Blender and closed the curtains for 6 weeks.
I printed all sorts of things, lamps, skulls, mushrooms and whatever i could find on thingiverse. I even printed a lamp and made it glow.
Some more electronics
Somewhere between starting a 7 week break and being a month into my new job I decided to start working on my robots and I started with Steve.
Steve is an 8 legged robotic spider with a positive attitude and very little brain power.
I say little because his CPU is quite literally very small, its an Arduino mega. The mega is a board with a whopping 8kb of ram, 128kb of software storage and 4kb of Eeprom and of course a massive 16mhz CPU.
I purchased a bunch of hc-05 bluetooth boards and a mountain of nuts, bolts and other interesting things and I was off.
Power!!
The biggest problem with having 8 legs and 3 servo motors per leg is that you have 24 motors to supply with power and communicate with.
This means that you need more power, and not just more, the power supply needs to be able to handle strong surges both start and stop without confusing all of the other electronics. Experience is the thing you learn after you need it, needless to say I now have that experience…
More 3D printing
3D printing is fun, interesting and very time consuming. My UP! Mini printer has very little print area so i had to come up with new and interesting ways to use the full print area.
I make the parts assemble from multiple pieces so I could iterate, and iterate I did! I had a total of 13 full re-designs and several increments in between to come up with the final (and still flawed) leg design.
Sidetrack: why spiders?
The first question that people ask me is why spiders? Of course my response is spiders are awesome and hey — why not?
I needed something intricate and complex enough to keep me interested, I needed something that could balance on an uneven surface.
Bipeds and quadrupeds are very rarely on balance, they rely on a constant state of change for motion. Spiders are elegant and their motion is calculable without too much provision for balance.
Always have a bold goal
With any project you need something to drive you and sometimes passion is not enough. I had to make sure I had heaps of stretch goals to aim for, I had plenty of mini-win’s to keep me interested, there was always an end in sight and I had very clear goals that qualified for completion.
The main goals were:
- To control Steve using a balanced and stable communication protocol from an Android phone
- Steve should walk forward and backwards
- Steve should turn on the spot
- All actions and stances could be tuned and configured from the remote device — aka no re-deployment for settings changes
And now; Steve
Here’s my little friend Steve
He loves yoga
Headstands….
And of course parties….
The unexpected journey
I spent the whole time captivated by this project, Steve excitedly became a reality as I pieced him together. I didn’t doubt at a single moment that I could finish him.
What I didn’t expect was how everybody else loved him and got on board.
Body parts!
With a fairly constant stream of parts being posted to work, eventually the team at the office got to know what I was ordering; body parts. One day I found that some of Steve’s body parts had come in and the box was illustrated with blood spots and an apt sign saying “body parts”
Party Spiders
We had a client night at Odecee where we demonstrated a whole lot of hard work that our team had spent developing innovative ideas, of course Steve was a headline act.
General Knowledge Spiders
The name of my trivia team at our Q4 function was Steve and every time we scored points everyone chanted Steve. We came second on the night but we were the only team who had a mascot that everyone cheered for.
Presentable Spiders
BuzzConf, I presented my spiders and ran a 3d modelling workshop — while BuzzConf was organised by friends of mine, the robotics sure did give validity to my workshop!
Caffeinated spiders
Just up the road at my local coffee fix — Newtown — they draw a spider on my coffee cup instead of writing my name — and they often sing the spiderman soundtrack to me as I walk in.
Well dressed spiders?
Gifts from family is made more complete by spiders, I’ve had several t-shirts with spider man and even a custom designed one from my lovely girlfriend.
Overall sharing was the winner of the day
I never could have imagined how much of an impact my hobby robotic spider army would have on the people around me. After I realised people were interested, I made a real effort to bring more story and share more of my progress as time went along and it turned out to be the best part.
Moral of the story? Share your ideas — even if its just a commentary.
Where to next?
I have a pretty hefty target of two fully automated robotic spiders that use a sensor array and inverse/forward kinematics to traverse surfaces.
The current spider project; Yorick, has a 1.3m leg span, an automated nerf gun turret (that tracks people), stereoscopic vision and 3D mapping of a room for pathfinding. All in varying levels of completion.
The next spider project is more of a consumer level robot that has all of the advancements of Yorick (apart from the turret) and can be controlled by any mobile phone.
Both of these spiders will have the following success criteria:
The next spiders success criteria
- All of Steve’s success margins
- They will walk over even and uneven surfaces in any direction
- They will be able to walk up a flight of stairs and turn around and walk back down again with only directional control being applied
- They will be able to locate their coil charger and charge themselves
Bonus objectives
- Kinetic or motion based controllers
- Stereoscopic cameras for FPV piloting from an Occulus rift or similar
- Controlled by thought from the Emotiv Insite (or similar)
- Waypoint plotting and obstacle avoidance over 1km
Thanks!
