In honor of Force Friday, we teamed up with the engineers over at Sphero to bring you two exclusive teardowns of Sphero’s just-released-today Star Wars toys featuring R2-D2 and BB-9E, a brand new character featured in the upcoming movie.

As one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars universe, there’s certainly no shortage of R2-D2 products for fans and collectors: we’ve seen garbage bins, kitchen timers, bubble machines, and even this jet plane. R2-D2 toys range from static action figures to robots that drive and respond to vocal commands.

Sphero engineers, not satisfied with what’s already on the market, told us they wanted to make the most detailed and realistic R2-D2 toy ever — one that embodies all of the essential quirks we’ve come to know and love with this classic character.

For this teardown, we’re focusing in on 3 major features of interest:

1. Turning head - the head contains a gearbox to power rotation and 3 PCBAs to power R2-D2’s light features.

2. Retracting third leg - just like in the movies, this R2-D2 has a third leg that fully retracts inside the body when he’s standing still and extends when he’s moving about.

3. Locomotion - Sphero’s R2-D2 moves in a very realistic fashion, driving along the ground in tripod mode and also waddling side to side when standing with two legs.

For our new readers, Fictiv is a manufacturing platform for part fabrication (including 3D printing and CNC machining) and our expertise is around the mechanical side of hardware development. For teardowns, we dig into the mechanical systems and leave the electrical analysis to our EE friends.