I'll share some of my experiences so far with InMoov and MRL lab here.

I came across the InMoov project about 18 months ago and marvelled at the videos on Gael's website. I knew that I wanted to attempt to build one of these, the only problem was I had no 3D printer. Building one looked out of the question at the time as well so I shelved the idea.

A few months ago at work a colleague raised the idea of buying a 3D printer. As the IT Admin I was roped into giving advice even though I'd never used one. After a bit of shopping around I found a company with a couple of ex demo Makerbot Replicator 2's for less than the price of one machine.

Needless to say once they arrived the idea of InMoov popped up again. I now have the use of 2 machines every evening, weekend and holidays.

It has been a fun ride so far, I've had about a 50% failure rate on my prints but learnt loads in the process and I'm now fairly confident that they will turn out acceptable.

So far I have almost completed InMoov's head bar the ears and jaw servo and one fore arm. I have most of the torso done and boxes with biceps and shoulder parts.

The head originally screeched badly on rotation due to me missing the part about greasing it. I found an excellent clear spray grease that was thin enough to soak into the moving part and dried coating them with PTFE, completely silent now.

The eyes have been tricky I bought a couple of very cheap USB webcams and tore them apart. Once they were exposed the light shining on the back produced a wierd pattern over the picture, so I experimented with building enclosures.

The first was too chunky and kept hittng the inside of the skull

The next ones worked better.

My whole eye assembly is wonky though. I couldn't get the screws into the two holes closest to the eye piece. In the end I melted PLA and tied to weld it together with limited success. As a result only one eye fits in at the moment.