Gidget the Gigapod (Giant Walking Robot)

thingiverse

Gidget the Gigapod stands out as a massive version of Max the Megapod thing 3075149 and our incredibly popular Vorpal the Hexapod thing 2513566. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNpiRIQW8oM This enormous hexapod robot measures 38 inches in diameter when standing, tips the scales at approximately 25 pounds (including battery), and can walk, dance, and perform other tricks as you can see in the video. Despite its massive size, the parts are carefully divided so that this giant robot can be printed on a printer with an 11 inch bed. If your printer doesn't have such a large bed, consider our Megapod project which requires only an 8 inch bed or our original Vorpal Hexapod which only needs a 6 inch bed. Build instructions and electronics parts lists will soon be posted to VorpalRobotics.com (the build process is almost identical to Max the Megapod so if you're experienced at building that project, you can probably figure it out without specific instructions). The robot and gamepad Arduino code are available on github and links for downloads can be found at VorpalRobotics.com. The first picture shows a size comparison with a kindergarden student. The second picture (the stack of robots) shows the gigapod at the bottom, megapod in the middle, and our original Vorpal Hexapod on top. It is highly recommended that you build the small version first! It's significantly less expensive in terms of parts, print time, and build time than the larger versions. Check out The Vorpal Store for more information. This robot can be controlled wirelessly using a Vorpal Gamepad (see our Vorpal Hexapod project for details on the gamepad). IMPORTANT NOTES PLEASE NOTE: This project is still in its test phase. It's far enough along, and seems to work well enough at this point for me to publish the files. But I may make some changes based on further testing. LONG PRINT WARNING: This robot is enormous as you can see from the picture with a kindergarden student standing next to it. The print time is over 200 hours and it requires about 6 kg of plastic. OTHER WARNINGS: The servo motors used in this project are rated 60 kg-cm, which is easily strong enough to break your fingers. Be extremely cautious where you put your hands when the robot is powered up. Also, be careful around small children as they tend to grab things unexpectedly (the Gigapod was turned off when we took the photo with the child posted here!).