What everyone at Smithsonian were seeing was years of work on a machine that truly walks on 4 tall legs, all made of hand welded steel. In borrowing the walking design of my Electric Giraffe from a little toy model from Tamiya, I managed to enlarge the model 24 times in size to the one ton beast he is today. Russell, as we affectionately call him, is fully self contained and needs no outside power source. Running on 36 volts worth of deep cycle batteries, he can charge himself on his own built in generator if need be. From there, his heart is a 3 hp electric DC motor that turns two hydrostatic drive pumps. These pumps run at a constant speed in one direction and need only a simple servo to move a lever back and forth, thus, the Electric Giraffe can walk forwards or backwards, and roll somewhat faster when he needs to on his wheeled feet.All this is controlled by myself with my radio control unit.
From there, everything else Russell does is on his own, running our “Raffe-Ware” computer program written by Russell Pinnington, who lives in England. Russell hand wrote all the code in C++ from scratch and made it modular, just like the synthesizer programs you see these days. The Electric Giraffe is running three major groups of modules. Sound Filtering, Visual Image Generators, and his Touch and Respond script engine. The laptop running this program gets all its data out our own USB port, converts it into CAN data and sends it back and forth to his head. The other data path is for his NEO-PIXEL LED illuminated spots, which are all brand new this year and look simply amazing in the dark. Stay tuned for chapter four and read tomorrow how Russell arrives at the White House.
You can get more information on our Electric Giraffe by watching the video!
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