Adding details to body and legs

Here come the last details which are added to the body and the legs. To smooth the edges where the cardboard was glued at the bottom, I am adding eight pieces of cardboard to the corners. These hide the overlaps, and they provide some nice additional structure.

While there is plenty of detail on the front side of my robot, the back side is still empty. Therefore I am adding three LEDs in a recessed mount (as used for the photo sensors and the microphones and also for the ultrasonic sensors).

Finally, the legs are still a little boring. I am adding a few curved pieces of thin wood to the upper part, and a few strips of cardboard to the feet, all painted black.

Those were the last parts of the body – now it’s time for more layers of white and black paint and glossy coating.

Mounting the arms

After thinking about the possible features, I decided that my R3-B9 should have two servo-driven arms that sit inside the long horizontal slit in body, together with a bar of four white LEDs. The arms should have a blue LED on the front side, and two white LEDs on the inside, so they extend the four white center LEDs when the arms are opened. Here is the assembly of the arms:

The arms are fastened to micro servos which are mounted inside the body on wooden plates.

The provisional installation looks like this:

In the second step, I build the mount for the four white center LEDs. The LEDs are not directly visible, but light through some white plastic (taken from a vinegar bottle).

I really love how this is coming together. Just a few more cosmetic details to add to the body and legs.