The alignment of the motors would have to be done perfectly in order to have them work with each other in a way that makes the first motor doing a 35° angle and the second one doing a 45° angle

Having started our project, we decided to foremost make sure that we’d have all the tools necessary. Based off of the smart lab inventory, we assured that we have enough servo motors, battery and a Giga R1 Arduino that could hold the current sent received by the motors. Talking about, AC current, we ran into our first problem being that the battery that we’d used couldn’t hold enough amps that would be sent out to the motors. So we understood that we’d have to make our own

In order to make our own makeshift battery, we welded together 8 * 1 mA battery aligned vertically each being turned upside down one by one, all welded with a metal rod on both sides in order to make the current pass. With an added rubber protection on both sides in order to prevent short circuits.

As we’ve been advised, we started printing a single leg of the spider and the part of the body where it’s supposed to be attached to. Just to be sure that it would actually fit together and that we wouldn’t make a bunch of useless print. Having messed up the proportionality (not having the same for the leg and the body), we ended up messing up the first print. We also realized that a lot of other factor came in play, such as the type of plastic that we’d use, the necessity of adding fillers inside the prints, putting a brim support so that the prints wouldn’t break off and others.

Finally, printing was done in multiple attempts, still, it came out as being one of the easiest tasks that we’d end up doing.

Having our pieces done, we tried linking the 3 pieces that make up the leg, however, we’d be met with our first real issue. Issue being that, despite having the right servo motor, the ones we had were weirdly too weak to support the whole structure. Structure that, for now, was only made of the plastic chassis that was printed, the coxas and, the Arduino board. The fact that it wouldn’t hold without the heavy component (being the battery and the captors with all the cable attached) would be our main concern on the project. Finally, we’ve decided to opt for the black motors which are supposed to be able to carry more weight. However, this would come with a major issue

Having done most of our prints, we’ve decided to take care of our ultrasonic sensor which was supposed to be able to detect obstacles, and then evade them. The task was pretty simple as we’ve tested our captor with a code found on the internet.

Having done all the prints necessary, we’ve decided to build the build for the first time. The build came in quite hard to do, as the black motors were slightly longer that the usual blue one. In order to fix the problem, we decided to print a batch of larger coxas in order to facilitate the montage of the motors. The enlargement of the holes came out pretty hard to do as the would have to be 2mm larger. So we needed to redo the build with the enlargement as only changing the proportionality would break everything. It came out not too hard to do

Finally, the motors would go in, but would need an unusual amount of screwing to get steady. In addition, we’ve decided to add a switch. Finally, we decided to transfer the code into the Arduino, which came with some problem as the codes wouldn’t work. Thankfully with some coding and help with the other similar project, we ended up making our own code that would work. With the first one making the spider stand up, for that the legs would have to be straighten out. And the second one making the spider walk either forward, backward, right or left and backing up when met with and obstacle detected by the sensor.