Head Boy Planning Notes

The shape and design for Head Boy grew out of three separate happenstances. First, we had learned that our free-forming abilities were lacking from our Symets and early solaroller projects. Joe wanted to solder to a board, as he did when building the Fred and SolarSpeeder kits. Such projects went remarkably smoothly, especially compared to those pesky Symets. Meanwhile, heads were discussed on the Beam list, along with multiple methods for running a “spinal cord” from a control circuit to the head. Finally, what really put us over was the aesthetics on the Junkbots headbot. It did not look much like a head, and so we decided to try something a bit different.

We purchased the Solarbotics Bicore Experimenters Board kit from Bug ‘n’ Bots. These boards included a suspended Bicore that matched the circuit featured in the Junkbots book. We then decided to build a head that would have touch sensors to limit how far the head would move. As Wolfgang was working on building solar engine dynamometers, we had multiple mouse SPDT MC switches. These were quickly incorporated into the design and used to trigger the Bicore.

Overall, the final robot resembles our initial plan. The main area of revision is in the limit switches. The head was originally to have more freedom in its motion. This had to be scaled back to improve the reliability of the switches.

About the Name

Joe named the head after the Harry Potter books. The Head Boy is the student who watches over the fellow students while in the dormitory. Likewise, our Head Boy watches over our robots in our house.