Sad Drinking Bot
A depressed robot drinking his sorrows away.
Concept
That is the first automaton I made! I needed an action with a very simple movement to start out and my dad had this idea which worked really well. The drinking motion could be done with a simple crank-and-lever mechanism and the robot only needed to be articulated at one shoulder. I also spent some time trying out different variations for the bot's appearance (mainly on paper) and ended up with the design that I kept for all the others.
Construction
I already had all the tools and techniques I needed from previous projects so the fabrication was more a matter of learning how I should cut and fold the metal pieces to get a nice fit. You can see some of it was still a bit messy, like the bot's hips which are pretty crumpled up. I also took the opportunity to try out several things for decoration to get a more steam-punk feel to the final result.
New things
Well at this point almost everything was new, but I can summarize the main things I learned:
- General shape of the body pieces and head.
- Spring-like arms and legs.
- Minimalistc crank-and-lever mechanism.
- Mechanism embedded on a bottom plate with a random shape (anything but a rectangle).
What needs improvement
When I was done with this I was honnestly a bit surprised that it was functional and looked okay, but I also really needed to improve several things. The main issues were:
- Durability: all the parts were just super-glued together without any thought to robustness (and several parts actually broke later when transporting it).
- Pieces should fit more cleanly together: the body parts mainly gave me a feel of "it worked but I don't really know why" so I need a process that's more easily reproductible, which means having a more precise idea of the shape of the pieces in advance.
- Less clunky decoration: most pieces here are not that eye-catching but I feel the seat is a bit confusing. To be honnest I just wanted something with an easily adjustable height so I ended up making some sort of spring, but it makes it harder to discern the limit between the robot and the seat.
Videos and more pictures
Sorry about the vertical video. At the time I didn't think I'd be posting these.
