*SORTA* Working Tasting Feet Pro-TOE-type V.2 (Patreon)

Aside from walking, one of my big plans for Noodle is to give him some serious tasting feet. What I mean by this, is more complex mechanical systems in each one of his cylindrical footsies…. the likes of a superhero transformer beast.

The systems I intend to jam in each of his 4 x 9 inch tubes include:

• retractable toes
• a retractable brush tongue
• a controlled salivary system

The prototype I put together at the beginning of the year works mechanically… but the solenoids that I had planned to drive all the mechanisms were too weak to actuate anything. More powerful ones would have drawn too much power… and just been a bad solution in the end.

So my plan for this second revision involves servo motors… which I’m more than familiar with using. The design of the new drive mechanism makes use of ramping cams, which press everything down as they rotate in place!

I finished 3D printing all the pieces for this new second prototype earlier in the week, and filmed this video yesterday morning.

Alas, if you don’t have time to watch the video, I’ll go ahead and say that the mechanism worked more or less. The major issue was that since they were 3D printed pieces grinding on top of each other… there was a crap ton of friction. Rotating the cam took a lot of force, and I’m almost positive the servo motor wont be able to turn it on its own. - So I didn't even try hooking it up yet.

Where to go from here. I took the prototype to SYN Shop and got a tremendous amount of suggestions from my friends… which was great!

The obvious solution was to add a thin strip of soft metal to the areas that make contact with each other… and to maybe consider adding a bearing to the hump which grinds along the ramp... 

My designer friend Bill went so far as to draw out an entirely new design for what would be a V.3  mechanism, involving threaded pieces within threaded pieces rotating against eachother… which I totally understand and see as being a more sensible elegant idea… It’d just involve me machining interlocking threads with a lathe. BWAHAHA.

Thanks for all the feedback from everyone on reddit /r/3dprinting and /r/arduino! You guys rock at forming solutions <3

I'll post another video once I actually hook up the servo motor and bother it to try and drive stuff. - After implementing some of these anti-chafe suggestions, naturally.