The Hexababy Robot

When I dream up hacks I usually think about them for a day or so first. I had an idea this week for another cat toy and I thought I had it pretty well worked out. Once I got into the build though, a mechanical problem reared it’s head which required an entire redesign and brought the project to a screeching halt!

So there I sat on a Friday night with a busy weekend ahead and no project to post… hmmmm.

As I looked around my workbench some things suddenly came together. I had this Spider robot from Hexbug.com that I bought at Radio Shack and a silly doll head that I chopped off from a doll I found at thrift store. Yes, I buy weird stuff from the thrift store. Hey, ya never know when you’ll need some doll parts right? I had already stuck the doll head on the spider one evening when I was at the bench goofing around live on ustream. I figured I needed to do some sort of hack to it though in order to post it up as a project. I decided to add some LEDs to the eyes and one inside the head and feed them the same power that drives the motors in the bot. Since they’re diodes already it would be easy to make the red ones light up in forward and the green one light up in reverse simply by their orientation to the power.

Follow along with the video as the mad scientist in me performs plastic surgery and hacks up a The Hexababy!

Next week we’ll get back to some electronics but until then, keep on hackin!