Here is an update of my progress on the droid so far. 

Well, it's been years seen I've posted anything about it. Last time should be dating back to my engineer degree. But I was working on it, hiding in the shadows.

The first big constraint was energy. The second one was time.

What I do not show here, are all of the previous efforts to design robot for 3D printing. Simply put, after the v2 appearance in my engineering degree, what was understood was that I need to design my own robot platform to comply to my vision of how things should work. The vision is about modular robotics, with modules connecting through mechanic-electric-software interfaces.

The first goal was to design the robot feet. My previous experience implied that I wanted a single feet to be a unicycle with servo on top, connecting to the main robot body through a special socket. But it took time to learn how to design and to print 3D models properly. Until I have arrived to the current solution with layered construction of modules using smaller parts and working on those parts independently. What allows for a certain degree of redesign of smaller parts without changing the whole.
To learn what I need from the software part, the first successful (not present on pics) model of the feet was upgraded with additional sensors. So I wrote an application with UI to see how this small unicycle sees the world - only to learn that the sensors I had are insufficient to automate the robot.

So with this rough picture of what is practically needed, the present version was designed.

 Once feet were completed, it was much easier to imagine how legs should look like. Well, now if I would print it I would make it shorter, but its fine for the current needs and can wait.

The next stage is design of the body. And may be, if I guess it right, I might switch to working on software first principle: with the vision of the next generation robot being mature now, some things can be thought about from the certain level of abstraction.

I hope that the next update won't take as much time as this one : )