Forums user Gucabe took over 18 months to build this awesome astromech droid, which he’s continually upgrading and adding additional features to. An inspiring build for sure!
Hi, ever since I was a little kid I fell in love with R2-D2 and have always wanted to have one of my own. 30 something years later I joined the R2 builders club and started working on my own astromech droid. Took me one and a half years to complete it, well to certain extent. A project like this is never realy done, you always add more and more stuff. But here is what I have so far.
His name is R4-Y0 (aka “El Rayo”) and he is an imperial astromech droid.
Main body controller: Arduino Uno. Has the main program to control the movement, sound triggers, servo signals and serial communication to daughter boards.
Dome controller: Arduino pro mini. Communicates with main controller and controlls the lights
Coin slot sequence: Trinket pro. and leds
Data panel: Trinket pro. led matrixes and neo pixels
The utility arms are servo driven and Im using the Adafruit metal gear servos along with the adafruit servo expander.
I am also using the adafruit 2mb sound board to add additional sounds. Main sound board is from a different source since I needed to use an SD card.
The control is done using a wireless ps2 controller and dongle. Connected directly to the Arduino.
This video is great because the ‘droid uses a sound board to emulate ‘motor sounds’ to make it a little more, well, droid-y!
Watch:
And here are more quick clips, showing the data panel:
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