Ugly Duckling

Sometimes you build a robot and when you’re done you think: “What was I thinking?” This wasn’t one of those occasions. I built this robot with the sole purpose of looking really silly. 

This is Ugly Duckling (UD).  It’s basically a LEGO body that sits on top of an aluminium frame.  The frame is the bottom half of a Parallax BoeBot.  It’s one of the robots in my blog’s banner, too.  In fact, the BoeBot was the first robot that got me back into robotics almost 4 years ago.  The BoeBot is a great way to get started in the world of robotics.  It has a great little controller called a BasicStamp that is super easy to program.  It comes with a great book that has all sorts of electronics experiments in it.  However, I outgrew it quickly and moved onto the Parallax Propeller, an 8 core controller that is super powerful.  I wasn’t very good at building frames out of cardboard and wood and didn’t have the tools for metal frames.  That’s the main reason I moved to the NXT.  I already had quite a lot of LEGO from 25-30 years ago, so it was a pretty logical step.

Anyway, before I get too nostalgic, here’s a video I made of UD (not) doing its thing.  It’s programmed in ROBOTC and uses my driver suite to control the Mindsensors NXTServo.

You can download the source (and duck sound) here: [LINK].