The legacy continues with Droid BB-8

Recently, the world met BB-8 — the Star Wars companion of New Republic Commander and flight leader Poe Dameron. BB-8 follows Dameron when he leaves the New Republic fleet and joins the Resistance. With endearing resemblance to and interactions with R2-D2, BB-8 also proves as plucky with his safekeeping of a map to Luke Skywlker’s location.

Special equipment: Holoprojector, welding torch, and cable launchers.

Related working designs: The BB8 of Star Wars has inspired some pretty cool toys from a company called Sphero. Check out a blog and video of our colleague Lee Teschler disassembling one of these BB8s to see how the toy works. Read Teschler’s blog to learn how the tiny toy uses a servo-controlled electric motors, plastic gearing, lithium batteries, gyroscope, ARM processor, encoder, Hall sensors, temperature sensor, Bluetooth Smart chip and a smartphone app to move on command.

NEXT: Deadly Giant with …