Ziggy was the first servo based 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 a 2000s era pre-Arduino OOPic II microcontroller programmed in Java syntax code. The OOPic was built on a Microchip PIC architecture and implemented a number of hardware objects that could be instantiated in code, simplifying the complex software interaction with a variety of hardware peripherals. It was great for a servo-controlled robot as it had an oServo object built in that made coding really simple. The OOPic also allowed the option of BASIC / C / Java code syntax which was nice as most microcontrollers of the time are programmed only in BASIC. The code listing for Ziggy's program can be seen here. Ziggy used 12 Hitec 700BB servos, running off 24 NiMH AA batteries. Everything else on the robot was machined by Nick on a Grizzly Mini Mill.

Ziggy has sonar sensor 'eyes' from Devantech installed. He was 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....