Basically what i want to do with my hexy someday, someday after i get it played with real good 
, is attach it to a rover, using hexy’s arms to articualte and manipulate a variety of objects, and objects together, even objects on the vehicle itself, from a remote location, with alot of sensors.
That sounds like it would require quite a lot of rebuilding… good luck with that!
My plans for now are a bit less ambitious, from the building perspective… totally new to robotics, and more of a programmer than an engineer (don’t even know how to do soldering yet 
), so for the time being, all I want it to do is for it to be able to navigate around a room, find its own position in a room, perceive a moving target and maybe follow that target. No idea if it will need more sensors to do that well (probably?), but that would be fine really.
Not really sure yet where I’ll go from there, just waiting to see what is/isn’t possible with this, and what other people will come up with.
Would be very cool if you could make it move with both the legs or wheels… so at some points you can drive it fast, and other non-drivable areas you could use the legs to get around the obstacle. Very excited to see what people do with the Hexys. Hope people will post pics on here.
I have a tracked robot I currently work on and I’ll probably start by trying to complete similar tasks with Hexy (wall avoidance, etc).
I will probably move on to using an arduino/android bridge to leverage some extra cpu and capabilities from a smart device.
My 3d printer is currently down while I switch over to snap connectors (for swapping parts easier); once it is back up I’ll probably play with printing variations on the plastics.
This could definitely work, there’s a bunch of extra screw holes on the body that you could use for mounting. The one thing I would worry about is that the legs can only rotate about one axis at the hip, so you might have to get creative with how you grasp objects.
One possible solution would be to replace the existing feet (since you won’t be using them for walking anyways) with a hand that can rotate at the wrist. There’s more than enough extra servo connections onboard for wrist servos if you wanted to go that route. You could also add the 4th servo further up the limb depending on how you want it to be able to move, but it might be a bit more redesign work.
[quote=“mal099”]That sounds like it would require quite a lot of rebuilding… good luck with that!
My plans for now are a bit less ambitious, from the building perspective… totally new to robotics, and more of a programmer than an engineer (don’t even know how to do soldering yet ), so for the time being, all I want it to do is for it to be able to navigate around a room, find its own position in a room, perceive a moving target and maybe follow that target. No idea if it will need more sensors to do that well (probably?), but that would be fine really.
Not really sure yet where I’ll go from there, just waiting to see what is/isn’t possible with this, and what other people will come up with.[/quote]
Check these guys out:
letsmakerobots.com
Lots of people doing lots of cool roboty things, often with limited resources and (more often than not) sharing the code.
My initial plans for hexy involve adding a piezo speaker, and some personality code. Closely followed by a raspberry pi and voice control:
aonsquared.co.uk/raspi_voice_control
Just imagine:
You: "Hexy, sit!"
Hexy: whine…sits.
That’s pretty awesome stuff. We definitely believe that R-pi is the future of hobby robotics, so we hope you share you work! I’d love to be able to show off stuff like that when we go to events. Kids in particular would get such a kick.
Maybe we’d have to add a little servo tail that’d wag when you have it sit. 
My plan is to make it able to navigate a simple maze, would be a great demo for school kids as they could make up the maze with cardboard boxes etc to have the Hexy get through.
Hopefully my Java will allow it to be controlled via Bluetooth and an Android phone. Then it can carry it’s own brain!
I’m also very excited that I’ve got my DSLR set-up to shoot time-lapse, so hopefully will be able to post some cool vids of construction and first steps
Can’t wait for October!
Woot! My pi arrived today, so I’m going to start playing with Julius on raspbian. Yay! also want to begin working on personality code. What microcontroller and language does the hexy use?
It runs an Arduino Leonardo based board running the Arduino bootloader, but with our own usb signature (its considered rude to rip off another company’s). If you could start by playing with a Leonardo if you really wanted to jump ahead.
I’m thinking about using a Parallela board (another Kickstarter project) as the “brain” for Hexy. Or something like a BeagleBoard if Parallella doesn’t succeed. I’m not much of an engineer and as a programmer with some interest in artificial intelligence I wanted to focus on more high-level tasks like using machine learning to make Hexy more intelligent.
What about a Raspberry Piboard? Seems way cheaper than the BeagleBoard.
And after seeing this I’m pretty pumped up to strap a RasPi on Hexy. X3
I think that the Raspberry Pi is perfectly fine to control Hexy. But I’d also like to play around with parallel programming, for which you need at least two cores. The Raspberry Pi only has a single core ARM chip whereas the BeagleBoard (or the cheaper BeagleBone) has a dual core ARM chip. Parallella has the multicore Epiphany architecture in addition to two ARM cores. I’m not sure that I’ll really need a multicore board but I’d like to experiment with it.