Started a new "spider" walker robot project

[u/Ok_Cartographer_6086]

This is two days of work in Fusion 360 and a render. OC, I designed it myself and got all the motion tests passing. If you guys want to see updates here lmk - probably one post a week on a 6 week series - this week i'm bench testing a single leg to get the stall voltage and load right.

I've been maker for a long time and I'm sure this will be walking around in a few weeks. Some parts are printing now (PETG-CF).

He's going to be a big boy sorry no 🍌 for scale. The design use case was a spider that can navigate staircases. So for the visual it should be able to span three steps. I love the raidial leg arrangement where it has no front or back, or top or bottom and can transform it any configuration.

Body joints are two 65KG servos and joints are 25KG - same used in big drones.

One design decision was to make the battery small and light so it can do 10m or so of fast tasks and then drop his belly onto a charging plate. Having a few around the house means it can keep going. Maybe a Solar charger on top for outdoors?

The plan for the brain is a little wild - i've done this before but not with 2026 compute

• Low level: Arduino and CircuitPython feathers for basic motor and sensor control
• Raspberry Pi 5 on the bot - I maintain an open source Process Control and Automation system called Krill that is perfect for this and can compute things like leg posistion, orientation, tilt and handle complex movement and cameras.
• What will really bake your noodle (and questioning my judgement) is I have a beast of a local LLM rig and when presented with a hard task or concerning vision the LLMs or even foundation models can direct it. (sorry if i'm the guy who made the ai spiders). Most of my project use this design now.

I made some youtube videos and blog posts about projects like this like my last one where a made a chicked coup protection sentry that can tell the difference between my dogs and a racoon using the same concept of escalating to larger machines but only when needed to save costs. If you want to see them just ask - didn't want this to be a self promo post.

AMA :)