Laid Back Koala

Beautiful piece of work! Congratulations Mega impressive - I now feel totally inadequate but will persist with walkers in pure Lego .

Wow . What a brilliant piece of work! Makes me want to tear my HexaPlod down right now and get into it. Thanks so much for sharing

Cute . I love these challenges that build something using just the parts in the set. They can be a real pain when there just aren't quite enough bits to achieve the desired build. I've nearly got another hexapod ready to go using the Spike Prime and Expansion set. Great I thought, plenty more beams and frames for a nice big model. But the lack of pins has made it a lot harder than I anticipated! Keep up the good work. You've managed some great creations using just the RI5 set. And (wrong thread) thanks for the coding videos too .

Thanks oracid. Love your web site. I'll have to spend a few pleasurable hours exploring it . I don't know very much about the Technic Powered Up hubs (yet). The motors and sensors are compatible with the Mindstorms/Spike hubs but that's as far as I know so far. The fact that they all communicate via bluetooth is encouraging. The model can certainly be improved and constructed way better than HexaPlod as he was limited by what was in the RIS. Just for fun I'm speculating whether the same thing can be done with the Spike Prime sets. Anton's Ladybug is one example but it lacks the ability to vary the step length, When we moved house a few years back I was banned from Lego "Until a few things get done around the house" . I did manage to sneak in the Crawler Crane and Bucket Wheel Excavator which are still waiting to be stripped for parts. Plus my ageing Technics, Cybermaster, Scout, Manas and RCX brick pit carefully sorted and stored away. Somehow life just seems to get in the way...

The lifter motor (middle legs) is at 80% speed, the outer leg motors are at 40%. Each is geared down 3:1. This gives enough power to lift the heavy body. Without the gearing, the lifter motor struggles. I kept the outer legs at half the speed of the middle legs to explore synchronising all three motors, which I'm still working on but a bit distracted by the arrival of my Spike Prime sets. The lifter motor moves from -180° through +180°. The outer leg motors move from -90° through +90°. So for the same time to complete a cycle, the outer motors need to move at half the speed of the lifter. This is only critical when trying to synchronise all three motors. With only the outer leg motors in sync (the demo program) this is not necessary and, in theory, you can increase their speed up to max. However, the legs start to slip if it's too fast! The whole point of this robot was that it can be built by anyone who only has the RIS to build with. The design is far from ideal and can be built a lot better using extra Technic pieces. But not everyone has that luxury and I wanted to give any newbies something different to think about. I now have the Spike Prime sets, which gives me two of the larger motors. So I will be exploring a more suitable build using my vast store of Technic bits. (I started collecting Technics in 1979. Back then, all beams had studs and there were no friction pins ! Incidentally, parts from back then still fit perfectly and still 'clutch' each other well.) The speed can be increased a lot by just extending the leg lengths out more to give a greater distance per stroke. If you download the zip file, the Read Me has full details of the strategy behind this guy. Plus the calibrator and demo programs and building instructions. Apart from programming, there's not much more that can be done to improve things given the "RIS only" constraint. I put a distance sensor on him, but haven't programmed that yet.

Thanks Mr Jos - original post edited accordingly. It's years since I last dabbled in YouTube

Four videos of the 'Plod in action: The hub seems to create a bit of audio interference on the videos too. Will have to experiment a bit. This is the first time I've tried videoing anything before, so apologies if they're not up to scratch.

This guy came into being from a challenge that I set for myself. Was it possible to build a hexapod robot using just the parts from the RIS 51515 set? It took a while to get right and many prototypes. The parts limitation being the biggest headache. HexaPlod Mk1 uses the alternating tripod walking method and is fully controllable for forwards, backwards, steering and tank turn walks. He also demonstrates how to synchronise motor movements using word block programming. If anyone translates any of this into Python, I'd would welcome the results as I'm only just getting my head around it. I've used many languages so it looks familiar, but I've yet to explore and understand the libraries. Also intrigued by the hub-to-hub library https://hubmodule.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hub2hub/?fbclid=IwAR0FsNoXblSZXMfXOhZMvc6GDSjIvgsb7hXY6lbrb4YXO20HqPJ2BHOmR34 . So lots to learn. The Building Instructions, a detailed Read Me and a couple of detailed word block programs are all in the zip file, downloadable via this One Drive link https://1drv.ms/u/s!Agv70JYmtXzNhMFlXl2cBZt0zL4aBg?e=v8rrOc . I'd just received delivery of my Spike Prime and Expansion Sets near the end of this project (well current pause really ). So been a bit distracted documenting this guy while I stared longingly a a couple of large boxes. I'll likewise be even more distracted now I've opened them . Hope you enjoy HexaPlod Mk1. Now back to Spike for while...

@BrickDesignerNL Many thanks for the link. Sorry for the original rather terse reply. I'd just started typing when I got interrupted and sent without thinking. So good to see some interesting docs have emerged 🙂. Now all I need is some spare time to absorb it all. It would be great to get the various scraps together in one place. Meanwhile, there's a lot to catch up on since my RCX days 🤓. PS. I still prefer PDF to Web pages. So much easier to read off-line 🧐. Living with somewhat unreliable broadband here in Aus! And I need Father Christmas to set up a Web site - my ISP used to provide free hosting, but no more 😥.

I used to use a fibre optic cable (from the ancient Technics Fibre Optics kit) to link an RCX brick to a Scout brick to do the same thing. The novelty of it (quite a few years ago!) extended it to controlling Micro Scouts and even a Bionicle Manta driving base (look it up kids - Lego did some weird stuff back then). Is there enough info out there about the port specs for either a dedicated fibre optic link between hubs or some other suitably isolated electronic link? Effectively a one-way serial link. Or a bi-directional serial link with a bit of work maybe? Need to know a lot more about the internals for that. Is any of that type of detailed technical info out there yet for these hubs?

@Coder Shah Thanks for the two links. I'd already had a look through the Spike Prime site, which was one of the things prompting me to start the ball rolling on some docs aimed specifically at the RIS. My last Mindstorms efforts were back in the Cybermaster, Scout and RCX days. There seemed to be plenty of detailed technical info back then. Hopefully TLG might realise that it is in their best interests to publish more than they do now. I love the AT TE walker model and its very cute leg mechanism. Not quite what I have in mind for my hexapod. My design uses an 'alternating tripods' method that I first saw on a Cybermaster. I built one on this principle years ago using an RCX and three motors. Not enough spare ports for the many touch sensors needed to correctly limit the driving movements so I used mechanical limit stops, torque gears and overdriving to make it work (not my finest piece of engineering !). The beauty of this type of hexapod is that it's very maneuverable and can turn in its own length - like a 'tank turn'. On each side, the front and back legs move in unison but only forwards and backwards. The centre legs have no back and forth movement - they act as lifters and act in unison across the beast. Difficult to describe so I'll have a dig through my archives so you can see what I mean. Anyway, when I've finished with the 'out of the box' robots I'm pretty much convinced that I can design one using just the RIS bits Ha, just found the original hexapod idea based on a Cybermaster (still there after all these years ): https://www.angelfire.com/space/avcampos/lego/Hexapod/Technic_Hexapod.htm That shows the principle. Extrapolate that to the RIS servo motors and more elegant leg solutions and you should get the idea...

Love the RIS 51515 set and working my way through the robots. Very disappointed in TLG for the lack of programming documentation and their weird concept of what constitutes Help and Support! For the Word Block Help, the window takes over the screen (your program disappears briefly) and a few clicks later you get to the top of the extensive text-only page. Meaning you have to scroll down from the top each time you want to consult it. Scrolling many, many pages if what you want is near the bottom. Admittedly, the novice programmer will get to learn how to use Word Blocks in a structured way as they plough through the Robot builds. But there's no option to print it or download it from support. The Spike support is way better. The situation for Python is much better as you can have your program and the Help on screen together. And you can easily paste examples from the help. But it's poorly organised if one is looking for an overview of the class model and available functionality. I couldn't take it any more so documented both in my own format. Note that the text is lifted from the originals (hope TLG doesn't mind) but organised, edited and formatted for PDF browsing (or printing if you must!). Both have fully working Contents, Bookmarks and Indexes: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Agv70JYmtXzNg4xmlnfk08-SQ3RZ_A?e=iIKusR The above link is shared from my One Drive account, which I haven't done before. So will some kind person let me know if it works okay. And if I've exposed too much of my folders! Now back to my own challenge - a working hexapod from just the RIS components...