I am building my MendelMax 1.5(3D printer) takes up most of my project time, so that said, my Hexy is stock at the moment. I used PoMoCo to demo for the first few kids but just me pushing the buttons was kinda boring so I let them “drive”. I ran the Hexy on a tether of USB and wall wart for power. This worked fine as the event was over an hour and did not want it to go to far from me or get kicked/stepped on. I had to replace a gear as one kid had it “type” then walk at the same time and it broke a knee servo’s gears. Luckily I had a few servo’s on hand to swap out.
PoMoCo is great for building and testing but… it’s got to too much on the screen for showing off. What I would love to see if a iPhone or iPad app (pretty sure it’s possible with the newer iOS devices the ones with updated BlueTooth chips) and or a simpler looking Python interface. One that reads the config file but just gives a control pad like feel and brings the feet back to “ground” before the next command. The only ones that could “chain” would be walk or turn. This could prevent some of the stripped gears IMHO.
So back to your question. Some course to walk through wold be good to hold their attention, cones, tape on the the table anything to have them focus on moving the bot around or over. People did not seem to mind the long wires for power as they get things only run so long on batters and event’s are usually longer than battery life. I did not wire up the distance sensor and got lots of questions on that. At most if all it did was cringe back on it’s hind legs when someone got really really close to the bot and there were no other commands that would at least have some functionality.
