ModDroid, we hardly knew ye

One of the projects I worked on at the Robotics and Neural Systems Lab was a modular robot we were going to design and build for a conference. Each module would be about 8" x 8" and stackable, so you could load up on CPUs and batteries, add some arms, mobility options, different heads...

Alas, for a variety of reasons we didn't get that far - we built just enough modules to make a basic robot we named ModDroid. ModDroid's coolest feature was his adorable head, designed by two of my labmates and featuring 8x8 RGB LED matrix eyes from Sparkfun. I had a lot of fun coding up the eye animations on the PIC control board.

 

I recently saw ModDroid sitting in a heap of parts in a corner of the lab. Looks like all we have to remember him by is this video... bon voyage little buddy!