The first stage of building a dancing, obstacle avoiding robot was to build the body and legs using my 3D printer.

Surprisingly, for someone who has been playing around with computers since I was eleven but only had a 3D printer for a month, I was much more worried about the electronics than the actual making stuff.

So confident, in fact, that initially I placed all six pieces into one print job.

Then I chickened out. I switched to four prints: the body, the head, the feet and the legs, in that order.

In one sense, I need not have worried. All the pieces came out just fine, though it took longer than I anticipated. The body, I naively guessed, would take two, maybe three, hours. Nope. Nearly eight!

Suitably chastened, I allowed ample time for the others.

The head and the body connected together with a satisfying snap. Things looked a little worse when I tried to place the electronics inside. The IO Shield fit in so snugly that I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get it back out. The “eyes” and the motors didn’t quite fit in at all. The apertures were just slightly too small.

I worried how much surgery would be required, but in the end a little scraping around the edges with a sharp knife did the trick.

Overall: fairly straight forward. Next: the electronics.