It would be great if there were instructions for upgrading the robots, too, but for the price, it's still a fun project for the kids to work on. Also, when the kids were trying to adjust their models from a short stride to a longer stride, they had trouble getting the joints apart (not wanting to break them). It states that the robot comes with a 1.2 volt battery, but ours did not come with a battery, and needed a AA battery to run (which is fine if you're using it at home and have a drawer of batteries, but not so helpful if you're away from home). The datasheet is particularly unhelpful (the pdf link above). I'm going to use a multimeter to verify the other one doesn't have issues with the motor before I try soldering the connections. However, the robot moved very slowly, and the students were disappointed (this might be because the wire from the battery to the motor still isn't connected well). I straightened the wires, and put the wire in between the coils of the springs, and one of the robots worked that way. In fact, the robot did not start to move at all with this connection. While the students had a good time assembling them, the instructions for attaching the wires (make a loop and attach it to the spring) results in a very loose connection. I bought two of these for a robotics class I'm teaching. Data Communication and Human Input Devices.The goal is to return to the origin after walking around quite awhile. Specifications Attractive color Two assembly choices for you to change the stride length and gait of the spider The robotic creature designed by yourself Operating voltage 1. Currently researching other methods to track displacement. The DFRobot Spider Robot Frame Kit is used to make an 8-legged spider-like robot frame which uses a single motor for forward /reverse motion. That would eat up Arduino resource pretty quick. Plus the processing to filter the noise is a fair amount of math and requires a software fifo. It is way to noisy and not sure it would ever work for slow moving robots. I tried using the accelerometer on the MPU6050 for displacement calculations.

I'll need to wrap the leads a few more times to reduce the electrical noise. But when batteries are fully charge it still messes the gyro up. So much so it looses all tracking and will hang up. The motor noise really messes with the MPU6050. Using Z axis and time it will walk a 3 foot square and return to within 4 inches of the starting point on a smooth floor. I added the MPU6050 Gyroscope to use the Z Axis for directional correction and guidance. STEAM Educational Robot - A complete Bionic Hexapod Spider Robot Kit based on Arduino. I didn't do bluetooth or the optical sensors. Also I think lithium batters would be better for this robot.

Robot spider kit