The Spider

(Teams Reeses Cups)

We are Team Spider consisting of Mathew Roxo, Chris Tiani, Devin Westmacott, and Christopher Beale. Our idea to create a spider was introduced by group member Chris Tiani and we all agreed to proceed with it. The idea of how to get the spider to walk was influenced by the behavior of a cockroach as it walks. This movement is done with 6 legs in which 3 move in a upwards and forwards direction while the other 3 move down and backwards. This group of three legs are located on the creature as follows, the two outside legs on one side and the middle leg on the other side.

As can be seen by the picture, the legs marked by the arrows in red would be moving forward and up, while the legs marked by arrows in black would move back and down.

The team met on a regular basis every week on Wednesdays, equally working together to complete the task at hand. There was an equivalent distribution of work between blog posts, solid work parts, and the code.

A decision was made to use a different kind of board than the arduino. The specifications and features of this board make it a prime candidate for motion controlled designs. The arduino board runs slower in comparison with this board, and since we had the resources to obtain it we did.

Since this is a different board, a different coding language is needed to be used. We particularly chose Isomax which is a form of the code forth.

An idea the team came up with after a few weeks of the project initiating was to include a controller that will be able to communicate with the spider so we can tell it what direction to go in. We purchased a RF M4 Reciever, 315MHz momentary type that already had the programming completed upon purchasing.

The plan for the spider is to have 6 servos mounted on the body and on the legs that will move them forward and backwards. There is a servo at the head of the spider that will be attached to a rubber band that is wrapped around the body of the spider. This rubber band will be used to lower and raise the legs. What we hope to be the final design of the spider is shown in this picture shown below. This picture will also give a better visualization of the servos and how they will move the legs.

There were only a few notable problems that we ran into. One was during the ordering of the servos. We ordered several servos and anticipated their arrival soon; however this was not the case. The company supplying the servos was very distant and the delivery took well over a week postponing any procedure with the project. The servos were needed to finish dimensioning the parts. Receiving these servos so late resulted in a delay in designing the parts. On top of this delay we have several parts to create, hence why we are still waiting on the creation of our parts. If we had known, we would have ordered the servos from a more reliable and closer orientated source and could have had the parts completed by now.