Wall-E DIY Project with Wifi (Part 1)

My girlfriend and myself love gadget like I stated before. We especially like robots as well and Wall-E is one of our favorites. I started looking for a nice decent size Wall-E on E-bay but in good condition they are very expensive. So I eventually bought a broken one also missing the remote control that normally comes with it. So when it arrived the first thing I did was taking it apart to see what I could do with it. First thing I removed was the battery compartment since I planned to put it in our gadgets cabinet and it doesn't have to drive around. It will get a fixed power supply.

So I started measuring what the electronics still did but that wasn't much unfortunately. So I decided to cut all the wires and take out the electronics board. Then I slowly started to apply a low voltage to all the parts and see what still worked. It turns our the motors were still working. It had a motor to drive the wheels, but I don't need that like I said. But there is a second motor that moves the head and arms and that was neat and I wanted to use that. Second thing I found out is that it has lights in the eyes that light up blue. That of course is very cool. It had a speaker and sound board, so that brought me the idea to use the same mp3 player board I used in HAL9000 and get some sound from the movie Wall-E. On the chest Wall-E had a fake light that I thought would be cool to replace by an actual red led and also there was a sticker on his chest to represent a display. I thought how cool would it be to replace this by an actual Oled display! So I started looking for one with RGB color and in the right size and I found one :)

So now I had a plan. Time for action. First I took another ESP12 that I had and attached the MP3 player to it. I spend some time to sample audio from the movie and put the MP3s on the player. Luckily so far I could mainly use the software I already made for HAL9000. And I also put in OTA updating since I already had to take HAL9000 down once to update the firmware. I also put that in there. OTA means I can now update the firmware of the ESP12 over WiFi without having to attach it to the USB port of my computer. That is very handy and cool :) So now I had to wait for the display to arrive and also find something to drive the motor and the eyes. Soon more in Part 2.