A BIG Update

Hi all!!

So for the last, like, forever, my computer has actually been a laptop plugged into a monitor, with a keyboard and mouse attached too. So I never used my laptop physically. I thought this was great because I still had a laptop when I needed it, but actually it turned into more of a problem than anything. First, although it was quite high-power in terms of laptop, it actually was incapable of running even quite old video games - including, for example, Portal 2. I also couldn't plug Dawn into it directly (it only had two USB C ports, and no other ports, and one of these was used for charging/power). The MicroSD card slot was difficult to get to. If I wanted to plug my Arduino in, I had to unplug the laptop from charge (because the other port was used for the monitor). It was all getting to be a bit of a nightmare.

So I decided it had to go. If you've never heard of CEX, they are a high street store that buys and sells used tech. Computers, video games, controllers, etc. I found a decent PC an hour away, and I decided to trade my laptop in and buy the computer (which was far more powerful and the same price I would get for my laptop in in-store credit). 

This was a disaster. They wouldn't take my laptop, but now I had no computer because my laptop had been wiped ready for selling. So I just decided to buy the computer outright and sell the laptop on eBay or something later. Well the desktop PC I bought didn't work when I got it home, and the next day, heartbroken and computer-less, it went back to my local branch for a refund. I was gutted. So that day I decided a used computer is not the way to go, and with the help of my wonderful husband I designed a new one online and bought that, for pretty much the same price. Here it is!

It looks like something from Portal which is totally why I spent extra for this case

I just love it. The LEDs on the front and back are changeable so at the moment it's blue to look like Wheatley, but it looks like a turret when I set it to red. I see you...

Anyway. That's the pre-amble out of the way. Do you want some more bad news?

If you look closely, you can see about 2in of lighter coloured banding just below the half-way mark.

When printing a quarter of Wheatley's body, it was extremely hot here in England, and so we had the air-con on. I didn't want the 16°c air to interfere with her printing so I put a T-shirt over my printer Dawn to keep her warm. This had a horrendous effect on this print, and though the print clearly went on to finish successfully, the lighter coloured banding was all spongy and hollow where the layers hadn't cooled quickly enough. The print was ruined. Each quarter takes 44 hours to print so I had cost myself two days and 250g of filament. Gutted.

More bad news?

The next print failed, 40 hours in to a 44 hour print.

I am so angry. I've now lost nearly 500g of grey filament that I was planning on using exclusively for the sides. Obviously I'm going to paint the model, but I just wanted them all in grey, it made me happy okay?! So a week later, I still need to print two more quarter-shells.

And of course, if you have been doing the maths, I ran out of grey filament and had to switch to black. You can see the first layer of black here.

And here it is this morning, as you can see there appears to have been a strong join between the black and grey. I managed to time it perfectly and change the filament right when she was printing the tree support so any over-under extrusion on the model itself was completely avoided.

So there's all the bad news. Now for some good news...

I bought a voice recognition module! I had been searching for something to do voice (or speech, actually) recognition so I could give commands to Wheatley and "talk" to him, to make him truly interactive. That was my vision from the start, but since I know so little about Arduino I was starting to settle for maybe some buttons at the back that would do what I wanted. And then I found THIS: The Fortebit EasyVR 3+ shield for Arduino. This thing is incredible but there is so little documentation about it ANYWHERE online. It looks like basically almost no-one has ever heard of it. It allows you, without any coding at all, to program and test a trigger "wake" word (think "alexa" or "hey Siri") and dozens - hundreds I think - of commands. You create a new prompt, repeat it twice into the included microphone, and hey presto it's trained. It even has capacity to output sound recordings too, like sound clips of Wheatley's voice! At the moment he doesn't speak, but you can see the video below showing the software picking up my voice and identifying the commands.

Testing Wheatley's wake word and a few prompts

It then generates code for you and you can just upload this directly to your Arduino. It's incredible and I am in love. Why don't more people use this?! It was so easy to make! I did have to solder and assemble parts of it myself, but that was by far the hardest bit of it. (Tip if you ever use this: clip the tops of the headers after inserting into the board and before soldering. It was nigh on impossible to get the solder to stick to the unclipped pins.)

A photo of the EasyVR 3+

There's various different softwares to use and there are five different modes that you have to put the EasyVR in (done by moving the jumper shown at the bottom of the image next to the words EasyVR 3) in order to program it properly; it can be a bit tricky. Luckily I found one - just one - YouTube video that showed me how to do it properly. You have to create a "bridge" between your Arduino and the EasyVR using the included Example sketch, or alternatively, you can pay $20 for a USB cable to interface directly with the EasyVR - no thanks.

So this bit works, it really works! I also tried the sound output. Yeah I'm not going to be using that. The sound was extremely quiet, comically so - I had to press the speaker into my ear so hard in order to barely hear it - and the compression was so poor that it sounded like Wheatley was on the other end of the phone, or worse. So I bought the Adafruit Music Maker Arduino shield with built-in amplifier. Unfortunately it doesn't come with stackable header pins so I have ordered them and they should come tomorrow. Then we can see if I can get some sound out of Wheatley which I am very excited for. The Adafruit Music Maker shield also has a built-in microSD card slot which I intend to store animations on.

I found some software for free called BotTango which is designed to allow you to animate a 3D model with servos for export to an Arduino. Unfortunately it doesn't have microSD card support just yet, but they've said it's coming - I've asked when that's likely to be.

So there's the update as of now! I feel like I made a lot of progress on the eye, very quickly, but now progress has stalled a lot as I need to print and paint wheatley before I can assemble anything else, really, and I am constantly waiting for whatever new part I bought to arrive. But hey. At least I can play Portal 2 on my computer!!