Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Making Makey Part 1: Planning and Prototyping”.
Hi, my name is sean thorson and welcome to the first installment building to make robot uh. If you don’t know me, i’ve made some pretty awesome stuff in the past. I’Ve also made some pretty goofy stuff in the past. This probably falls right in the middle and now we’re going to walk you through step, one which is going to be establishing scale and sizing so that we can actually make the thing functional for a person to walk around inside of it. So the first challenge you run into with a character – that’s shaped kind of like this, like you might notice, he’s not really people proportioned all right. First off, he doesn’t have hips he’s almost as wide as he is tall and uh making something like this into something. That’Ll, walk around is a little bit of a challenge, so started kind of noodling over a few different ideas for how to make it work, and one of the things we were talking with was, if we set them up so that the person’s feet or where the Character’S feet are: it means that the person’s hips are going to have to be somewhere up inside the main body and that still puts their shoulders pretty narrow inside the main body.
So the idea is to set it up so that the person wearing it has their elbows, where the character’s shoulders are and then, if they’re, able to reach down to where their wrists are, where the character’s elbows are now all of a sudden they’re going to have To have handles to actuate whatever’s going to happen with the forearms and the hands so for visual we’ve got our assistant here, it’ll end up being something about like so just to give you an idea of where a people will fit inside the thing. So, having established roughly how we’re going to put a person into this thing, the next thing we need to do is determine the size of it. So as it stands right now, our drawing here is about just shy of eight inches tall and just about seven and a half inches wide, and since we don’t want to make it fit a person who’s eight inches tall, we’re going to have to scale that up.
So, to determine a scale of factor, we need to decide how tall the thing is going to be overall. The final answer i got back is: we want to make the thing just a little bit over 5 foot 10 inches tall, which is a total of 70 inches, which is like 178 centimeters if you’re part of the rest of the world and uh. So, in order to get our scale we’re going to take our 70 inches and we’re going to divide that by the 8 inches that we’re starting with, and that means that everything we’re looking at on here needs to be 8.75 times whatever measurement we get off.
Of this, so, for example, from now on, if we want to know how big a piece is, we pull a measurement here, multiply it by 8.75 and we have the size that we need prime example we’re looking at just this piece yeah making a mess. This piece is going to be we’ll call it four inches wide, so four inches times our scale factor means that the overall width of the main body is going to be 35 inches by the time we’ve scaled it up. It’S also a good idea to go ahead and see what this is going to look like in full scale.
Now i don’t have a big enough printer or a big enough piece of paper to make this thing. 5 feet 10 inches tall, so we’re going to cheat a little bit using a projector and stand someone up next to it and, as you can see here, we’ve got a projector set up to get the height right for the character and the rest of it projected On top of him puts everything pretty much where we’d expect it to be so the top of the character’s body is going to sit on the wearer’s shoulders. The character’s shoulder is going to be right about where the wearer’s elbow joint is going to be, and then the character’s elbow is going to be right about where the wearer’s wrist and hand is going to be so. In order to make this function we’re going to have a big box, it’s going to have shoulders that are swiveling on either side of the box. They’Ll be able to hang free if they need to, and the wearer will be able to reach in through the shoulder.
Through the upper arm and grab a handle which will be attached to the forearm and that’ll, allow him to do all the puppet work and actuate the lower section of the arms. Now a couple of things we’re still going to tweak as it stands right now he’s going to be ponderously wide as far as getting around in a crowd, so we’re going to end up making the whole thing just a tiny bit narrower we’re also going to extend The main body a little bit so that the box that makes up the chest and abdomen region of the character is actually going to hang down a little bit past the wearer’s hips. So it gives it sort of a skirt effect so that you won’t be able to see where the top of the legs are attached, since, in this case the character doesn’t have any hips. Next step is going to be to pull measurements off of this product projection.
That we’ve got sitting on the wall and then once we’re happy with those measurements as a double check for our paper test, we’re going to go ahead and try cutting a bunch of pieces of cardboard out, duct tape them together and do a quick and dirty function. Test to see how this thing is going to move around, so the thighs are going to be rectangular blocks. Pretty straightforward, they’re cut a little high on the inside for comfort’s sake and they’re also notched out a little bit in the back so that he can bend his knee without bumping against the box itself.
The next thing we didn’t bother making any feet for him, but this will give you an idea file tuck into the shin section. As planned, the shins will actually be bolted into the feet. The thighs will be strapped onto the wearer once he steps into the shin foot assembly. We strap the feet onto the wearer’s feet and he’ll be good to go for walking around a little bit. His mobility won’t be great, but he will be able to get around main body will fit on roughly like so, which is going to be simple enough and the finished result.
The head is going to be half of a spear instead of this box, but we’ll just use that to approximate it. So this is a pretty good approximation of how the thing is going to be able to move how it’s going to work. Give us a good idea of whether or not the scale is going to function as designed we’re calling this an effective proof of concept. The next thing that needs to happen is i’ll start using this to get some ideas of the dimensions for the actual parts.
We’Ll start cutting some things out of mdf building some things out of foam and then once we’ve got our initial shapes, the next step will be pulling molds and then we need to pull parts out of those molds grind all the edges and put everything together. Quick and simple project done in no time at all. You .