It was awesome to hear the launch of PiWars 2019 and we loved the space theme. That led to a week of lunchtime brainstorming – what famous space exploration robots are there? We ended up discounting most those as being a bit too spindly to 3D print. So what else could we do with the theme? What robots are there in space films? And Wall-E was the obvious winner:
- tracked – so uneven ground would not be a problem
- boxy – so shape should be printable
But: The PiWars rules limit the width of robots and Wall-E has a fairly square footprint. And a big chunk of the width is taken up by the tracks. So were we going to be able to fit all the electronics into the body?
That has turned into an interesting challenge. We were fairly sure we were going to use similar electronics to last year, but we were also sure that we would have to reduce the size of them. Which means designing a custom PCB…
So the challenges we’re going to face:
- making it look like Wall-E – arguably the most important thing!
- mechanical design – 3D printing tracks to look like Wall-E’s is going to be hard
- making the electronics fit into the tiny body – ideally with extra servos to animate Wall-E 🙂
- Finding places to mount sensors at the right height for the challenges
- Figuring out how to mount the attachment hardware
- Plus all the unexpected stuff we haven’t spotted yet!