L'Hexapod: Prototype fabrication

Previously published

This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here.

As I mentioned back in April after I’d put together my first prototype leg, “the prototype leg has some fairly major failings from a mechanical point of view”. Ideally the real legs will be designed and cut from sheet material, either plastic or metal. Getting to that point is going to take some time though and right now I haven’t been able to locate a UK based laser cutting service at an affordable price. Anyway, before I get to the point where I can start fabricating the real legs I thought it would be useful to get myself some materials to enable me to prototype the robot’s chassis and legs. The Meccano Special Edition Mechanical Workshop set seems to have enough parts for me to get started on bolting together some brackets for the servos and, hopefully moving the mechanical side of things along a little. We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll just sit around making the models instead :)