Ziggy is a hexapod (six-legged) robot designed and built from scratch by Nick Donaldson. The robot is about two feet long and took Nick 9 months to build, from original concept, through leg prototyping, 3D CAD design and manufacture. Ziggy incorporates sonar obstacle avoidance and runs a fully autonomous program allowing him to walk around avoiding objects.

He is built around an OOPic II microcontroller programmed in Java syntax code. The OOPic is great for a servo-controlled robot as it has an oServo object built in that makes coding really simple. The OOPic also allows the option of BASIC / C / Java code syntax which is nice as most microcontrollers are programmed only in BASIC. The code listing for Ziggy's program can be seen here. Ziggy uses 12 Hitec 700BB servos from Servo City (best servo prices and service on the web!), running off 24 NEXCell NiMH AA batteries from Thomas Distributing. Everything else on the robot was machined by Nick on a Mini Mill. All raw materials and fasteners for Ziggy were purchased via McMaster-Carr's excellent online catalog, which Nick highly recommends.

Ziggy has sonar sensor 'eyes' from Devantech installed. He is now fully autonomous, able to not only roam around avoiding obstacles, but also interact with people around him. You should see Ziggy raise a leg to mark his territory....