Twitchie is an open source multi-purpose robot kit. It has the capacity to frighten and scare, but also the power to love and care! It's a regular pathos-o-matic! Grown men scream! Maternal instincts long dormant, suddenly activated! It's a robot unlike any other, and you can make one.
This page is the place to get all of the plans you need to make your own. Alternatively, you can buy a complete kit from makezine.com. Questions? Need help? Email me.
The fuzzy robots pictured on this page are all built on the same basic kit. There are endless ways to dress them up! In the kit, there are laser cut wooden parts that can be assembled in several different configurations. The parts are designed to make it easy to use glue and other craft supplies to attach cloth, fur, buttons, string, doll parts, and all kinds of stuff.
The circuit board is based on the Arduino project, and shows up as a Lillypad in the Arduino programming environment. The cpu is an ATMEGA168. This means that changing the firmware is relatively easy and cheap. There is also a six pin ICSP header for an AVRISP if you are more advanced and can go without a bootloader. As an added bonus, the Twitchie circuit board can be configured to fit easily into a breadboard!
For $99, the kit consists of:
- 3 Servos
- 6 Laser cut wooden parts
- 1 circuit board
- 1 ATMEGA168 preloaded with Lillypad firmware and Twitchie software
- 1 set of various electronic parts such as LEDs, capacitors and resistors
- 1 printed manual
I will post all of the firmware and CAD files soon, for now please feel free to email me and I will send them to you directly.
