Robot Dialogs

I've made quite a bit of progress on the Selectric II project . Since the last post I managed to get a fair amount of the mechanisms necessary to actuate the keys figured out (at least for a first attempt). I made the mechanical additions using a bunch of Erector Set pieces. For the time being I've used fishing line to tie the Erector Set levers to the solenoids. Initially I had it set up with fishing line going up over a bar above all the key press mechanisms (essentially pulling up on them) but this didn't work and wouldn't have survived the test of time (rubbing against a bar all the time...). This past week I made my first go at the toner-transfer & ferric chloride etching process to make a Solenoid Driver board. I also did quite a few things in Eagle for the first time. The circuit for the driver board is below, it's a simple power FET (IRL2703) circuit with some blinkin' lights thrown in for good measure. Eagle files below, I used default ...

Started working on a Selectric II typewriter project. I used this typewriter last year to make business cards for the KC Maker Faire. This year I'm going to hook a bunch of solenoids up to it and throw in a micro-controller to allow me to control it's output with a PC via serial... So far I've just got the mechanisms for key presses figured out and the solenoids mounted. Next I've got to get the control circuit board worked out and assembled, along with switches to read the keys when they're pressed. Then it's programming the micro-controller and figuring out what to do with the end result...Zork's been done...maybe epic ASCII art on tractor-feed paper...in any case it'll be KC Maker Faire and it'll be awesome. I did get one solenoid hooked up in a bread-boarded circuit to make sure I had parts that would work...

I've got an epic St. Patty's Day planned for this Saturday and I thought: wouldn't an LED-ified hat be awesome? Then I thought: "I have to. It's a moral imperative." A couple days shopping around for a bowler hat and green LEDs and here's the result: The LEDs were mounted by using a new (sharp) x-acto knife blade to slice a single small slot in each LED position. I pinned a shamrock pattern to the hat first... The circuit was wire wrapped not soldered. Once all the LEDs were poked through the hat I used copious amounts of hot glue to make them permanent. A 10 kO pot is in line with a 9 volt battery to current limit (and provide a brightness control). A Velcro wire management strap was sacrificed and hot glued in the brow to hold the battery in place. The circuit: Original Image Source: led.linear1.org/led.wiz The top of my head does touch the top of the hat but there's actually just enough room in the front tip for the battery. It fi...

I've finished Puzzle Box #2 (see Part 1 of this design). Here are some details from the build. I started by using a planer to cut all the 1.1x0.23 inch lattice trim pieces (from Home Depot) down to 1.1 x 0.2" inches (to fit the design). The lattice stock comes in 13 foot pieces, I cut those down to 6.5 feet before leaving the store. Each piece in the bill of materials was cut very precisely to match the drawing. Because pieces overlap everywhere their was very little room for error (I basically went for +/-0.01 inches tolerance). Many pieces were cut three at a time. All told there were over 140 pieces. I cut a few extra of each piece because the saw would occasionally chew up an end, or a piece would have cracks or knots. I worked on bite-sized chunks at a time, it was a complicated assembly process because I had to follow the design exactly in order to have the correct piece overlapping when larger pieces got glued together. Everything is held together by Elmer...

I'm working on a second wooden puzzle box... It has taken forever to get the design right in Sketchup ( five six attempts)...trying to minimize the number of different components while only using a single type of wood... 1.1 inch x 0.2 inch trim. I'll keep taking pictures as I go and make another post later. This design is open source, go nuts. The Sketchup file is available here . I've gotten the design down to 21 different piece lengths. A bill of materials made using the CutList plugin for Sketchup is here . Final thought: I hate the lumber industry. If you say a piece of wood measures 1.25 by .25 inches, how the hell do you get off selling something not even close to that size? At what point did gross inaccuracy become okay?

I haven't done a proper project in a long while, and this past weekend it finally got to me. So I decided to try my hand making a prop/replica of the tuberous AI from Portal 2. I give you Potato GLaDOS : Most of it was sculpted from Sculpey and painted with acrylics. The audio comes from an old mp3 player I had lying around. The electronics consist of a LM386 audio amplifier, speaker, LEDs and a simple circuit to pulse the LEDs with the audio.  Here's a long winded explanation breakdown of how it was made . There's a boat-load of build pictures out on Flickr. The audio was pulled from here and spliced together in Audacity . Please support the developers and artists of these amazing games: Purchase Portal 2! And remember: "This. Sentence. Is. FALSE".

I started with pictures and models from the tubes. The image below is a particularly good example showing both sides. Model Reconstructed by ~ Zareste I went to the grocery store and found some models that I could hire for pennies an hour. I used Sculpey for the potato and GLaDOS, but I didn't want to bake it for four million years, and I needed a hollow inside for all the electronics so I made a potato-ish shape with aluminum foil. Keeping the outer layer of aluminum foil as smooth as possible will help when the foil is pulled out of the baked Sculpey. As you might expect potatoes are particularly easy to sculpt. Imperfections are the main feature...trying to keep fingerprints and fingernail marks out of the clay is the most difficult part of it. I don't have a picture, but the large hole (through which electronics are inserted) was cut out of the clay before it was baked. Scupley isn't too brittle after baking, but I didn't want to take a chanc...