By now we’ve come to expect a bountiful harvest of licensed merchandise to follow every Star Wars film. This year’s crop included many flavors of BB-8 so every fan can find something to suit their taste. At the top of this food chain is a mobile interactive “Hero Droid BB-8”. For those who want to see how it works, [TheMikeSenna] cracked open his unit to feed our curiosity.

Also called “Spin Master BB-8” for the manufacturer, this toy is impressively sophisticated for its price point. The video surveyed the mechanical components inside the ball. Showing how the droid travels, and how the head articulates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWPv44e__qk&feature=youtu.be

How to Build a BB-8 Robot? today i will teach you step by step, it’s easy.

That’s right, the robot I teach you to make this time is the BB-8 in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Ever since the first official trailer was released in October, the adorable BB-8 in its peculiar design has attracted a large number of fans and its popularity is comparable to some main characters. Of course, it itself is a leading character who played many parts in the film. At the world premiere in Los Angeles, BB-8 also‘rolled over’red carpet as one of the major characters.

The first was to keep it low-cost. Some spend $1000 to $1500 on their BB-8s. I wanted to spend as little as I could, so as many parts as possible had to come from my existing stock and from online classifieds and thrift stores. Not counting the parts that were discarded along the way, the cost came in just shy of $300.

Are you a Star Wars movie fan? Have you ever admired of the futuristic droids, R2-D2 and BB8 of the latest remake, that the movie has introduced to us? If yes, then what if I can tell you that you can build your own life-sized BB8 droid? It’s basically a ball that you can freely control and spin. Interesting, right? We can actually build a low-cost DIY life-sized BB8 droid with just simple and cheap materials to use.

Build A Life-Size Phone Controlled BB8 Droid (Full-DIY-Tutorial)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QbFvDIyy1k

Driving BB-8: More Than One Way to Move this Bot
http://hackaday.com/2016/06/24/driving-bb-8-more-than-one-way-to-move-this-bot/

Finally the workings of the official BB-8 that you’ve seen rolling around at various events have been revealed. Its makers [Matt Denton] and [Josh Lee] participated in an hour-long presentation at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 just this past week where the various views of its internals were shown in action. It’s since had BB-8 builders (yours truly included) analyzing the workings for new ideas. We also now have the official name for it, red carpet BB-8.

For the first half of their talk they went over how BB-8 was implemented for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Droids of The Force Awakens Panel | Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzzWmTIVv3c&feature=youtu.be&t=9m44s

Until about a year ago, the Droid Builder’s Club had just about everything figured out to build any sort of robot from Star Wars. Building an R2D2 clone was easy, and even R5 and R6 droids were common. There were even a few attempts to clone IG-88. Then Disney happened, The Force Awakens was released, and the world was introduced to the hero of the third trilogy, BB-8. Several people have gone to incredible lengths to replicate BB-8 as a unique homebrew robot, but no one has put in more effort than [James Bruton]. He’s wrapping up his third DIY version of BB-8.

XRobots – Star Wars BB-8 Droid *VERSION 3 PART 12*, STABILITY UPDATE & Head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZVsAi1Izxs

BB-8 is not only a cute little droid but also presents dandy of a challenge for hackers ’round the globe to try and recreate in the garage. Nonfunctional models are a dime a dozen and the novelty has long worn off the Sphero toy. This brings us to a legit full-scale BB-8, seen in action in the video after the break.

Lucky for us, [Ed Zarick] has written up a blog post that’s as impressive as the build itself. [Ed] has drawn some inspiration and shared knowledge from several online groups focused around recreating the BB-8. He also provides some thorough Solidworks assemblies that look painfully detailed.

Ed’s BB-8 Build Guide
http://www.edsjunk.net/wordpress/eds-bb-8-build-guide/

[James Bruton] has just finished and posted the designs for his very impressive BB-8 robot build.

http://xrobots.co.uk/BB8-2/