Ottoham Slinkon

Hello, today I am going to show you the steps I took to build my own Otto robot. The supplies you need consist of a 3D printed otto robot. This can be purchased as part of a kit or just do a Google search to get free plans on how to print your own otto exoskeleton, if you do not buy a kit then the following supplies are also needed.

4 servos

Arduino nano and PCB to hook up electronics

speaker ultrasonic sensor

5V power supply or battery pack

8 female dupont connectors

usb mini b cord

various screws (shown in picture)

screwdriver

wire cutters

electrical tape

3M tape

There are many tutorials you can follow to guide you through the building process and you can either use Google or youtube to assist you. The first step for me was attaching the to leg servos to the inner body using 4 tapered screws. Next cut off about 5mm from 2 of the white spacers and insert them into the legs and attach this to the leg servos using the smaller non-tapered screws.

Attach the feet servos in the slots paying careful attention to orientation. You'll have to carefully turn the legs 90 degrees to be able to thread wires back into body, secure servo with tapered screw as shown.

Slide uncut white spacers into the slot in the feet and attach the legs to feet securing with small screws.

Attach power and on/off switch. I secured the battery pack with 3M tape and drilled a hole into otto to fit the on/off button. If you want to attach to PCB then just strip the wires and add 2 female dupont connectors as shown. The 9V battery I used did not want to work with the robot so I had to use usb to power otto.

Insert the arduino nano attached to the PCB inside the top part of the robot and secure with 2 tapered screws (4 wouldn't hurt but I ran out of screws). I would place the eye sensors in first before inserting the PCB.

I added the speaker on the outside because there was no more room in the robot and actually liked it better as it looked like he was wearing a top hat. I used the schematic from hackaday (google search) to figure out how to hook up all the electronics and this is considered the standard way to wire your otto.

When it comes to programming your robot I highly recommend installing otto blockly (google search) as it makes programming your robot very easy. I used arduino nano IDE to program this robot and you can find countless codes for the robot on github. Just make sure your otto libraries are up to date (also found on github) because depending on which program you run, otto will have to access specific libraries. I used the otto avoid code to test my robot.

VERY IMPORTANT: Many new generic arduino nano boards will need a driver installed to get the board to work. Googling sparks gogo will take you to the driver, but the driver can also be found by googling CH340 driver. My robot was dead in the water for about 3 weeks before I stumbled onto the driver that actually got it to work.

Once the code is successfully uploaded then you robot is ready to go, just add you own personal touches to him and release him into the world. After looking at my robot, the top hat speaker made me think of Abraham Lincoln so I added some weatherstripping beard goodness. After noticing how his walk resembled a moonwalk I knew what I wanted to name him and voila, Ottoham Slinkon was born.