I was making money off of an open-source project.
I wanted to give back and so I designed the mePed for that reason.
So now, companies in China, Russia, India, Canada and Mexico are all building and selling mePed kits as well.
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I've been a maker for a long time,
I really enjoy robotics and I'm enthusiastic about getting other people into robotics.
And so I've designed the mePed robot, which is a Quadruped robot.
It has Arduino microcontroller on it, ultrasonic range sensor that's controlled out of the box
through infrared remote control and the entire design from the hardware to the software, is open source.
So you can download the Laser-cut files or 3d printable files to print out your own body.
The circuit boards, a custom circuit board they designed to break out nine servos,
Wi-Fi module, Bluetooth module, and any unused pins on there and it's based on Arduino Nano
And I wanted to build a low-cost kit that people could get started in robotics with.
So what was the inspiration to even start in this process?
I was on Thingiverse one day, I had a laser cutter and
I ran across Ben Gray's MeArm project,
and so I've always wanted a robotic arm
so I downloaded the files cut one out and and loved it.
And I noticed Ben wasn't selling them in the US,
so I started building kits and selling them because it was open source.
And so to give back to the open source community since
I was making money off of an open source project,
I wanted to give back and so I designed the mePed for that reason.
So now, companies in China, Russia, India, Canada and Mexico are all building and selling mePed kits as well.
That's pretty awesome! Could we see it in action?
Absolutely! So we have an infrared remote and
So out of the box, it's a remote control robot so you can make it move forward and back and left and right
You can make it wave, you make it take a bow and then also make it dance.
And so that's the core functionality out of the box
but then from there you can download our sample source code off our website and hack it
and interface with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and other sensors to make it do more as well.
Awesome, would you mind just going a little bit more in-depth
on the hardware that you have made here, the electronic hardware?
Okay, sure. So the electronics, we have ultrasonic range sensor,
Infrared remote and sensor then it has the Arduino Nano microcontroller,
then this is our own custom circuit board that that ties it all together
and makes it easy to interface with the eight servos and then it runs on four double A batteries
and so those are tucked under there has 8 mg 90s metal gear servos
one to pivot the leg and one to raise and lower the leg
and then the whole body is laser-cut out of MDF wood
Excellent! So what expansion do you have?
So you're showing the things that it can do out of the box? But you can add things to it, correct?
Correct, so you can add the the Wi-Fi module and Bluetooth module
so you can communicate with the cell phone.
And then also we have a I2C port so that you can daisy chain up to 255 devices on that port.
Say you wanted to add four light sensors to it, one on each side of the robot
You could measure the values of light on each of those sensors and make either walk
towards the light or walk away from light and stuff like that.