Hex-a-pod I made for a Boy Scout High Adventure, 18 boys and 5 adults each built one of these arduino based hexapods.

thingiverse

This is a remake of Barry Scott's Hexapod Ant, many thanks to him! I spent around five hundred hours converting his design into this while learning Blender at the same time. Also, I would like to thank danf from astromech.net for helping me get Bill Porter's PS2 Wireless Controller arduino library working. I recommend printing most of the parts at thirty-five percent to keep weight down, except for the upper leg and mid leg pieces which should be printed at sixty-five percent due to their need for strength, as well as the four main body parts which can be printed at twenty percent to conserve weight. The Jaws should be printed at one hundred percent and I'm thinking of upgrading them to accept a metal servo horn because the current connection is certainly a weak spot. Our arduino code is available and open, feel free to use it and if you improve it please upload your code for all to share: https://github.com/ari86m/Kinne-Hexapod-Software. RGB LED's in his nostrils and ultra-sonics in his eyes still need code to operate at this time. You will need to print the following parts: 1 head 1 tail 1 body spacer both tops and both bottoms which we fused together using acetone since we build our hexapods from ABS. 6 upper legs 6 mid legs 6 leg spacers 6 feet 6 servoless legs 12 lower legs 1 eyes 1 Arduino mount 1 left pincher 1 right pincher A total of 53 parts that will take about 120 hours to print depending on your printer's speed. BOM: 1 arduino mega 1 5300 mAh battery or close 1 9volt battery 13 MG996 servo's 1 PS2 wireless controller 1 ultra-sonic sensor We made our own arduino shield to plug the servos into and we run the arduino off the 9volt battery while the servos are powered by the 7.3 or 7.4 volt 5300 mAh battery to avoid electrical noise problems. The Body Tops can use either plastic servo horns or metal ones, I recommend using metal servo horns because I have stripped some plastic ones causing a broken leg. Since this project was done on a scouting budget we had limited funds available and we spent about $175USD for everything except the plastic for the 3D printers. A more expensive battery would be smart but the rest works just fine. If you want to add a third degree of movement to the legs, you can replace the "servoless leg" with a "midleg" servo holder and it will work just fine. We used two degrees of motion to keep costs down and weight low. When I added the third servo to each leg, the hexapod had a hard time due to the increased weight, possibly because of the cheap batteries we used. I will add wiring diagrams and advice soon. Some videos can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH3sS--7Cvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSAhqxDhP_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAkhP33Q4Kg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN3hOfVMdiU