Episode 1 – We hit the jackpot!

This is the story of our spider. It is not just a spider. Our spider is a robot kit we won at the Tadhack-mini London during 9 – 10 April 2016. To be precisely, it is a PhantomX AX Metal Hexapod Mark III Kit.

The Babelonio team
The Babelonio team
PhantomX AX Metal Hexapod Mark III Kit
PhantomX AX Metal Hexapod Mark III Kit

This prize was awarded by Kegan Dougal and Oddvar Lovaas both from matrix.org for our Babelonio hack. Babelonio is a multilingual speech recognition and translation piece of software using [matrix] decentralized messaging.

Video of the Babelonio presentation can also be found here. Kegan and Oddvar, thanks for your professional help during the hackaton.

Our team, consisting of Steven Bakker, Timo Uelen and Bart Uelen, feels obliged to turn this spider into a remotely web-controlled creeping crawling spider. But first we have to put the robot kit together …  ..  .

Winning a prize is easier than putting it together.
Winning a prize is easier than putting it together.
So many parts :-(
So many parts 🙁
Is this the assembly instruction ?
Is this the assembly instruction ?
Initializing the servomotors
Initializing the servomotors

Now let me introduce you to Mary Jane. This adorable name originates from Mary Jane Watson. Mary Jane is a fictional supporting character appearing originally in Marvel comic books and later in multiple spin-offs and dramatizations of the Spider-Man titles as the best friend, love interest, and one-time wife (as Mary Jane Watson-Parker) of Peter Parker, the alter ego of Spider-Man. More about Mary Jane on wikipedia.

Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot!
Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot!

For us Mary Jane is the nickname for our spider-on-the-web project.

Coming days we will assemble the PhantomX AX Metal Hexapod Mark III into a crawling six legged spider.

To be continued …