Product Description

A classy robot chassis designed to express robot emotions with an artistic flair.

Buddy 4000 is everything you are looking for in a robot chassis that looks like a classic robot. Features include:

Posable Movements
With the ball & socket joints on the arms, head, and feet, you are able to pose the robot in a myriad of different ways. This can be used to portray robot emotion.

Servos
There is mounting space for servos in the head and side panels of the body for the arms. Plug the servos into an Arduino or the microcontroller of your choice, and you can make the robot move.

LEDs
The head has a mounting area for two 5mm LEDs to be inserted. In the dark, this casts a nice glow inside of the head and through the eye sockets.

Art
What is a robot without art? The chassis comes with plates that can be attached to the skeleton of the robot. Choose from different designs of plates to create the elemental style of the robot.

Inside the box

Inside of the box you will find:

• All of the pieces needed for creating a Buddy 4000 Robot Chassis
• All of the plates for decorating the exterior
• Necessary #6-32 screws and hex nuts
• Special Buddy 4000 robot token
• Buddy 4000 ‘Words of Wisdom’

Design & Mechanical

The design of this robot was based off of the old ‘tin toy’ robots that had wind-up mechanisms inside of them.

To get the pieces to attach together, 6-32 screws and hex nuts are used. The pieces have ‘captures’ for the nuts to slide into.

Filament Colour

Buddy 4000 looks zippiest with two colours. The main colour is for the body and head, and the alternate colour is for the arms and feet. Let us know which colours you would like us to print your Buddy 4000 in. Here are our current colours:

• Flourescent Yellow (VoxelFactory)
• Kelly Green (VoxelFactory)
• Glow in the dark Blue (VoxelFactory)
• Safety Orange (Makerbot)*
• Grape Candy (Makerbot)*
• White (Makerbot)*

* currently on low supply, might not have enough to be the main colour (but will be enough as an alternate colour).

Plate Style

Right now we have two plate styles that you can choose from:
1) Classic
2) Star

The Classic style is the one seen on the yellow & orange example robot, and the Star style is the one seen on the green & white robot (see this page).

Documentation & Files

Check out the main page for all the Buddy 4000 documentation. There are links to the:

• Build section (and part 2)
• Electronics
• Programming
• Open Source Hardware

Name Your Price

The special ‘name your price’ feature lets you name what price you want to pay for Buddy 4000. There is a minimum price set, however anything extra will be going into our robotics fund / Maker Faire NY travel fund. We really appreciate your help, and hope to see you at Maker Faire NY!

Testing

We have created three demo Buddy 4000 Robots for testing using our production machine and settings. As with all 3D printed pieces sometimes modifications are necessary.

We recommend being patient with the ball & sockets and leg plate. Depending on the ball, sometimes a portion of the socket on the leg plate can split. This can be fixed using super glue.

The screws do not need to be extremely tight. The captures for the hex nuts were designed to ‘give away’ if too much force is applied (so that the entire piece would not get split apart). When making the assembly, take your time with the nuts and screws. If a piece does break off and needs fixing, we recommend some super glue.

These techniques and more are discussed in the build section.

From our days of having it on our desk, it can withstand being dropped on the floor quite a few times. But in general, it’s not a good idea to intentionally drop robots on the floor.

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Product is only the chassis (and mechanical pieces). Electronics, servos, and LEDs are not included.