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Final project overview

Baksi

My final project in the Fab Academy is Baksi the educational robot:

BaksiThe name Baksi comes from the Icelandic verb baksa - to busy oneself. In my concept sketch the name was Baks, but then my son always called it Baksi.

Baksi is meant to be small, inexpensive, simple and safe. You can see all the electronics, and yet it has a clean look. And you can make one from scratch in a Fab Lab.

You can check out the fun 1 minute presentation video on the Presentation page and I've documented Baksi's development on the other pages here on the left. This documentation is incomplete and unclear in some places. I'm going to leave it like that because this is what I did during the Fab Academy. New stuff is here.

Design spirals

  1. I went through design spiral 1 of Baksi the robot in Output Devices week. Those motor drivers didn't play well with the brushless motors.
  2. My final project counts as design spiral 2. It's a complete redesign using a bare SAMD21 microcontroller and a DRV8313 BLDC motor control chip for every joint. I'm very happy with it, but it's not ready for distribution.
  3. I've continued development on Baksi after I graduated from the Fab Academy. Design spiral 3 is in progress here. This time it will be made of motors and PCBs and nothing else! This version will be better documented, so that people can build and use a Baksi robot themselves.