You’ve heard that there is a special creature that lives in a foggy habitat rich with old electronics. After searching all night, the sun is rising and the fog starting to roll in more. From afar you see something waving. Are those arms? They’re really long for arms. As you move closer, you start to see its mouth and eyes, it’s smiling, and its eyes are fading in and out gently. It finally comes into view… aha! It is the creature, the Oshawatt robot!
Hello friend of Oshawatt!
I created a new robot last week in Inventor. It’s designed to sort of look like a sloth with really long arms, and also have the cute charm of the Pokemon Oshawott. It’s a cute open source robot. The arms have lots of degrees of freedom, the head can bob up and down, and the legs are able to swing. The expressive mouth can look like a cylon, happy, sad, surprised, and also mini-fangs.
I haven’t exactly built it yet, though SpikenzieLabs has laser cut it for me which is pretty sweet! Also going to use Adafruit’s servo controller (thanks Adafruit!) eventually for controlling all of the micro servos! I don’t have the money for all the servos and sensors that are needed for it, so it’s a good thing for it to be Open Source hardware right now!
The CAD files are Autodesk Inventor 2013, but the major assemblies have been transported into Autodesk 360 and embedded on the webpage so that everyone can view them, pan, zoom, and rotate the 3d models. It’s pretty cool! We also include standard .eps files with the pieces on them which can be opened in Inkscape.
It’s open source under the CERN OHL v1.1 license. There’s some details over on the Oshawatt page on RoboBrrd.com that would be good to read first, then you can check out the filez!
Here is a description of Oshawatt’s personality:
Like all cool robots, Oshawatt does have a personality that I imagine for its character. It’s the type of robot that wants a lot of sensory feedback, so it will be waving its arms like crazy, and then humans will interact with it, and then it won’t know what to do. When that happens, it becomes sort of shy and starts to bob its head and animate its mouth expressions. Of course, its eyes are an overall indicator of its mood (assuming they are rgb leds). Oh yeah, in case you didn’t guess, its favourite dance would definitely be YMCA, though it has trouble with the ‘M’ letter sometimes.
For more details and learning more about how the design was made and all of that, please check out Oshawatt’s web page! It even has the Autodesk 360 models on it, so you can spin them around.
All I ask is for a thanks and a smile 
Any donations are welcome and mega-appreciated to fund some more of my crazy robot character experiments!
Crossing my fingers that someone will make a Oshawatt robot! It would be so cool to see it up and running!
