Over Christmas, I made a first video of R3-B9 in motion wearing a Santa hat in front of our Christmas tree.
After a phase of more activity in December (to get R3-B9 ready by the start of TFA), I expect future progress to be less fast. Only minor mechanical work remains to be done (mounting the sensors, the LEDs, the speaker, and the arms). Most work will be about testing and then soldering the circuits (including the microphone preamps and the shift registers for the LEDs), followed by the Arduino programming.
In the meantime I have promised to build further robots for my kids and, of course, they want their own blogs for this. So, here is the blog for my son’s MSE-6 mouse droid https://mousedroid.wordpress.com built at 83% of the original Star Wars version. And here is the blog for my daughter’s astromech droid X7-OB https://droidx7ob.wordpress.com which is a close relative to my R3-B9. But she wants it purely mechanical with no electronics, no Arduino, and no motors. However she really likes the idea of X7-OB being able to talk – so we have to see about this later…
Astromech Droid R3-B9 