70th Explorers Garrison: Forums

Ever since I was a kid I wanted a droid. Well I have been giving it a lot of thought and have finally said I am going to start one. I know most people with go with the R2 or R5 droids but I have to be different. So I am going to build T3M4 from KOTOR and KOTOR II. If anybody in our group has experience building a droid from scratch I would love to talk with you before I start.

(Yes I am aware of the R2 builders group. I was just wondering if there was anybody in our group or local to KC that I could talk to and get advice from)

Those are cool droids since they would probably store easier (and they make great tables from the looks of them ).

Tony

Did you have the mouse driod a Vision-Con last year?

I still have him. He just needs a new battery charger I would expect this droid to take over a year to complete. I am just in the planning stages now. I have a whole pad of drawings already

Looking foward to watch your progress

C-ya Sunday!

got all the drive train components in from a creative ebay shopping trip

2 x 300 Watt Electric Scooter motors
1x 24v battery pack
2 x electric scooter rear tires with sprocketed hubs and brakes
2 x electric scooter drive chains
________________________
$114 with shipping.

I plugged in each of the motors into the battery pack and they flipped themselves over on the table from the torque!

Wow, a drag racing T3M4. This ought to be interesting... How fast do you think it could go in theory?

Tony, I wanted to make a T3M4 myself. Good luck in your project!!!!!

rebelbuttkicker wrote:Wow, a drag racing T3M4. This ought to be interesting... How fast do you think it could go in theory?

Well one of the 300 watt motors is enough to push a human on a scooter at around 15 miles an hour. The droid should (if everything goes the way I plan) weigh less than 150 lbs so I am guessing around that 15 mph mark. The biggest question is am I going to need to add more battery weight to give it a useable run time.

If only you could add nirtous.

Cmndr Falken wrote: (Yes I am aware of the R2 builders group. I was just wondering if there was anybody in our group or local to KC that I could talk to and get advice from)

I'm sorry I hadn't been reading the forums for a while. Work's been busy. I've built a robot from scratch before. I toyed with building R2 myself a while back. I saw one at Archon and I knew I wouldn't be able to hold a candle to the quality of his construction so I decided to build K9 (from doctor who) instead. I also thought that K9 would be smaller and easier to transport, but I'm not sure that's true.

Some other people posted pictures of my work online. It's kinda cool to find pictures of my stuff. I'm guessing this is a garrison member:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tk394/264476668/

My primary goal was to make a robot. Not to make a replica of K9. I'm a mentor for FIRST which is a competition for high school students to build a robot for competition. I joined to learn more about robots. Let me know if there's anything I can help with.

What are your goals for this project? I haven't played KOTOR so I'm not completely familiar with T3M4. Are you just trying to build a remote control system that looks like T3M4? What do you want to move on him? Are you going to try to make it programmable, perhaps autonomous? I had wanted to program mine to follow a target and maintain a distance of about 5 feet. That way I could walk around and it would follow me. I couldn't figure out how to do that in a way that would work both indoors and outdoors.

Andy

There are a number of stages I have planned for this project. As I am in the planning stages of this project things are still very fluid. Here is what I have so far.

Stage 1 - Base drive train and driveable frame
This will be basically an over glorified R/C car using 2 channel R/C receiver and Sabertooth 25A dual channel DC motor controller.

Stage 2-Skinning
Add styrene skin to droid and begin artistic touches to droid.

Stage 3-Computer Control
Embed tablet pc or laptop inside droid and interface it to the sabertooth controller via ttl based usb to serial cable. Use RDP protocol over wifi to allow remote access to tablet computer. Sound will be added at this stage using sound functions of computer.

Stage 4 - Add Head and arm motors and controls
Add a second serial based sabertooth controller controlling the head turn and arm retract/extend functions.

Stage 5 - Finish artistic skinning and final completion
I will need help with this step as this will involve creating blast/carbon scoring marks on the droid's skin.

Looks like a good plan. Let me know if you need any help. I would highly recommend that you have your plan for step 4 prepared before you begin work on step 2.

You might be interested in this for step 3:
http://www.mini-box.com/BoomPC-2-Car-PC ... tegory=101
1.2Ghz computer that can run on DC power from 6V to 32V in a small form factor for only $250. It's already got the serial port and 6 USB ports. Add memory, some sort of hard drive (or thumb drive) and a USB wifi card and you can control it from a wifi laptop. Low power consuption's not a bad thing either.

Andy

Well as I said plans are fluid. I started work on the control program for T3M4.

Here is a screenshot of the program below

http://dagobahswamp.dyndns.org/public_h ... enshot.JPG

Its a pretty basic interface but should function (assuming I have the controller protocol right).

I found a paper doll of T3M4 that claims to be to scale and am scaling it up to get the dimensions for the project.

Heck I might actually start building here soon.