About the Phoenix Hexapod Walking Robot
The Phoenix Hexapod Robot has a more natural looking, more articulate leg and body design. The three DOF (degree of freedom) leg design means this robot can walk in any direction! The robot uses 18 Hitec HS-645 servos. The combo kit includes everything you need to build a functional robot except batteries. This robot design was heavily inspired by Kåre Halvorsen (Zenta on the forum). This is quite possibly the nicest looking commercially available hexapod out there. Beware of imitations!

The Mechanics
The robot is made from ultra-tough high-quality aluminum Servo Erector Set brackets. Note, this robot, as cool looking as it is, does not have the payload carrying capability of the other hexapods available from Lynxmotion. There is a penalty for pivoting the joints on the servo output shaft alone.

Controlling the Robot
The "no electronics" version includes the mechanics as well as the servos, but not the microcontroller or the servo controller (SSC-32 strongly suggested). 

The combo kit comes with the BotBoarduino. By offloading the servo pulse generation and sequence movement timing to the SSC-32 the BotBoarduino has plenty of power to do some really cool things. The Phoenix program allows the robot to walk with variable speed, in any direction (translation), or turn in place (rotation), or any combination of the two. The leg lift and ride height is adjustable as well as the gait walking speed. You can rotate the body in every axis. There are preset walking modes and gaits to choose from. All of these are accessible from the controller. We recommend the wireless PS2 controller (RC-01) to get the robot up and running quickly. The Phoenix code also supports a serial control mode for controlling the robot via a serial connection. The Phoenix code was written by Jeroen Janssen (Xan on the forum). Thanks, Jeroen!

The programming is already done for this robot. You no longer have to be a computer scientist to play with this level of robotics. The control options are: PS2 remote control, Xbee / DIY RC stick radio control, and TTL serial control.

Powering Options
The Phoenix does not include batteries or a charger. It is compatible with the following batteries and chargers.
  Chargers
    > NiCad & Ni-MH Universal Smart Charger (USC-02)
  Batteries
    > 6.0 Volt Ni-MH 1600mAh Battery Pack (BAT-03)
    > 6.0 Volt Ni-MH 2800mAh Battery Pack (BAT-05)

Important!
To keep costs down we are not providing printed Assembly Guides. They are provided online, so you will need to print them when you order the kits. By providing the Assembly Guides online we can provide more detailed and up to date information than the old hardcopy method allowed.