Megapod FAQ

[Steve Pendergrast]

Hello,

As you may have heard, we're nearing the ship date of our supersized "Megapod" version of Vorpal The Hexapod. We're getting a lot of interest, and pre-orders are coming in. In fact I just put out an order for our first large batch of parts for this project.

I have drafted a new FAQ on the Megapod project, it is here:

http://vorpalrobotics.com/wiki/index.php/Max_The_Megapod_FAQ

(It should be considered a preliminary draft under construction right now!)

If anyone out there in forum land has a question about the project that they don't see answered there, please feel free to respond on this forum or send email directly to sup...@vorpalrobotics.com so we can update our FAQ and make it as  useful as possible.

We've been demonstrating our test versions of the Megapod at conferences and exhibitions this month and it really draws attention.

Thanks!

Steve P.

[Craig Yurchison]

I am very excited and looking forward for this release.  Some of us might have large format printers (I have an ft5 and tevo little monster) and was wondering if the stl's are going to be released uncut as well so the parts can be printed complete?

[Steve Pendergrast]

Hi Craig,

Yes, I was planning to post the base and cap models (which are the ones requiring large build volume) as a single part.  However, I would strongly suggest you make sure you're very well dialed-in on your printer, as a failed print for the base will kill 500 grams of plastic!  I would also suggest brims on those parts when printing as a single part. Even though they stick fine for me, you certainly don't want to print the entire base then find out that one servo holder pulled off the bed and is unsable.

To give you an update, we're still on track to drop the STL files in time for the NYC Maker Faire (Sep 22) where we will be demonstrating a megapod. We had to make a special megapod-field that uses portable dance floor tiles, as even one single megapod won't even fit on our vorpal field (2 feet by 4 feet and we normally run three Vopal Hexapods on that field). We're also still on track to ship pre-orders no later than Oct 1.

This past week we finalized the electrical system design and ran a whole bunch of tests on it, and it looks really good. We have started manufacturing the electrical systems for the pre-orders. The megapod draws typically 5 amps when dancing/walking and 0.25 amps when standing still. Current can spike up to about 8 amps briefly during the start of scamper mode but settles down to about 5A within a second or two. For safety we're including a 15 amp fuse in this electrical system as the amp outputs are much higher than the small hexapod.  We also finalized on the battery: we're going with a 5s NIMH battery with Tamiya connector because they are commonly available from hobby and RC stores and even amazon.com. We recommend at least 5000 mAh but it will work down to 3000.  If you use something like a Viper DRIVE 6.0V 5000 mAh NIMH battery ($40 from amazon) run time is approximately 70 minutes.  To avoid brown outs on the logic circuits, they are powered separately by a standard 9v battery.  The on/off switch is now a SPDT so it can switch both batteries at once.

Scaling this project up has been a lot of work but a lot of fun too.  Of course I am already dreaming of new designs for going up another factor of 2 for the 2019 NYC Maker Faire (I have an associate with an 8 foot tall printer that can print furniture!)... what I learned from building the megapod makes me think this is possible, but we would probably only build such a huge beast (gigapod???) for demo purposes as the material costs would run into the thousands.