Four legs, hand-tuned
Every leg got fitted and adjusted over and over until the walk stopped looking like a machine and started looking like a little creature.
HANDMADE BY EBEN SIYABALAPITIYA
Made of spare parts and stubbornness.
A little robot spider I designed, printed and wired myself. Momo walks, makes faces, and has cost me two Raspberry Pis so far. Built over a lot of late evenings, one problem at a time.
What makes Momo, Momo
Built on a desk, not a line
No factory, no production run. Just a desk, a soldering iron, and a lot of evenings that ended worse than they started.
Friendly by design
Rounded shell, slow movement, nothing sharp. He's a spider you'd actually let walk across your desk, and hopefully not fall off.
Motion
Getting him to actually move
Momo walks in a trot. The legs work in diagonal pairs, one pair swings while the other pushes, so two feet are always on the floor. Each step phase takes about a fifth of a second. He can also walk backwards, turn, sit, wave, dance and hold a pose for photos.
Every servo got its home angle calibrated by hand through the web panel, because no two of them sit in the frame exactly the same way.
At a glance
Specifications
What Momo is actually made of.
- Legs
- 4
- Servos
- 8 MG90S, two per leg
- Brain
- Raspberry Pi Zero W
- Face
- 23 expressions on a little screen
- Runtime
- About an hour and a half
- Answers you in
- 4 to 6 seconds
In action
Say hey, ask him to sit
Momo listens and answers back. A greeting, a sit, then a little pause while he works out what you asked. Sound is off by default, so tap the speaker to hear him.
Life with Momo
More than a workbench project
Sometimes he chases the cat. Sometimes he just talks back. These are the little moments that make Momo feel less like a machine and more like himself.
Scaring the cat
Momo chases him down, then celebrates with an emote.
Yapping with Momo
A regular conversation, followed by the response he decided was right.
The maker
Eben Siyabalapitiya
Momo is a solo project. I designed him, built him, wired him and wrote every line of code myself, at a desk in my room. Took months, two dead Raspberry Pis and more failed leg prints than I want to count. I kept going because I wanted to see him walk.