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.

R2D2 DIY Project with Wifi

Another nice project I did last year was operating our R2D2. It is actually a (useless) clock that also made some sounds like it does in the Star Wars movies, but you had to press a button for that. So I decided to have a look if I could fix it someone to do this in an automated way. So first things first. I took it apart to see what is inside. And that didn't look too complicated. My first idea was to put in a relay over the switch, but then that would make a clicking sound I rather not have.

So the most sensible thing to do was to try and put in a Arduino like mini computer called an ESP-12. It has several IO pins so I started by attaching the button to one of the inputs of that ESP and started measuring voltages on the electronics to see what happens when you press the button. It turned out I could easily attach the wire that came from the switch to an output of the ESP and done. I could control it. The original sound it made was way too long to be funny (like 30 seconds). So I was already happy I could make the sound shorter. 

And you do that of course by writing software. The nice things about these ESP chips is that they also have WiFi Build-In so I started by logging it in to my home network and writing a small web server to run on it. So now I could control it over the network. I do have a Home Automation System in my house. So the next thing was to have that system to control R2D2.

And then we get to the hardest part of course: Putting everything back together. Luckily there was plenty of space to put the small ESP in and the leads of the SMD board I soldered it one just fitted over the original battery compartment. I attached it with some double sided tape to it. After that I had to put the legs in hold everything together and put the screws back in. Well that took me a while. I'm quite good with electronics, but not so much with mechanical stuff. But I got it. I decided with my girlfriend to put it in the hall and have it triggered by a sensor on the front door. So R2D2 now act as a welcoming committee when we open the door for guests.

And to conclude a small video of R2D2.