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Spider built by Philip

Picture credit: Philip Baptista

On May 7 2002 I received this email from Philip Baptista:

Well, thanks to your website and spider, i was able to get a great
mark on my project! I built a spider also, heavily inspired from
yours. The major difference is that mine is brainless but it
detects metal. Its purpose is to detect explosive landmines. I
built it out of an aluminum no parking sign, gears and motors from
www.jameco.com, coat hangers,
lots of screws and a metal detector kit i also got from Jameco
(really great service by the way).
It basically walks forward, backwards and stops automatically when
it detects metal. Contrary to what i expected, the mechanics was
much more simple than the electronics, once i got the right size
for the legs. It runs off a 9V battery that gives it almost
2m/minute forward speed. It could climb a 20 degree slope too. Im
quite proud of it since it works very well, it was worth all the
hours and the $200 canadian total!
I included the best pics of it, once again, thanks for your site
really helped me out alot!
Oh yeah, this is my second robot (my first was an extremely simple
insect wheeled robot) i did it for my high school secondary 5
project. It's pretty much complete, i did consider adding a
microcontroller at first, but my project had a deadline and my
experience with chips a limit so what you see is how it will
remain. It's also too heavy to start adding more components.

Philip Baptista

I asked about the rather high cost, and Philip told me:

Well, in the $200, i included the "mistakes" i made while choosing
parts. The motors cost me $20 US each, the metal detector $14, the
gears about 70 cents each, plus $5 for the relay switch for it to
stop when metal is found and the duracell battery. 
As for the rest, i owned it so it didnt cost me anything (screws,
wire, tubing, etc.) Where some of the cost also came in was
shipping and handling from www.jameco.com and border charges
since i live in Canada and it's a US company.

He offered his school paper about the robot for publication on these pages,
which I was happy to accept. Here you have Octoped - Searching for Peace (1239K)
It contains diagrams and more photos, which should be useful if you want to build your own Spider.

 

Spider built by Tomas

Click on the photo to get a full view. Picture credit: Tomas Galvao

Tomas Galvao sent me this fine photo of the Spider he made after reading my pages. His workmanship looks great - better than mine, actually - and he tells me it's his first mechatronical project! The beast is rather heavy, but walks. Its `brain' is a temporary affair. Like me, Tomas is still working on the final version.

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