Hello World!

 Hi all!

AmazingOomoo here. I don't know how successful this blog will be. It's my first time doing a blog because my life is not usually interesting enough to read about. But if you are here from Reddit, hooray!!

The Background

So I love a good project. And often my ideas for project come to me all of a sudden and then I just have to do it. I'm very impulsive. Much like starting this blog, the idea just came to me whilst I was on the toilet.

When I am concentrating at work, I tend to put music on, but I find music with words very distracting as I end up focusing on that instead of reading or writing which is what I am supposed to be doing. So I put video game music on. Uncharted, Tomb Raider, and my favourite at the moment - the Aperture Science Psychoacoustic Laboratories album, from Portal 2. Listening to it really got me in the mood to play Portal 2 again, and on my 2nd playthrough I thought "I wanna make Wheatley." I just suddenly had to have one.

I have a lot of experience in 3D design using Blender; I taught myself how to use it, and I've been using it for 11 years now. If you've ever heard of XNALara, that's where I got my knowledge and experience from. I was quite a prolific modder and I had a lot of attention on my DeviantArt where you may have come here from. (I was also an asshole a lot of the time, a regular keyboard warrior, but hey I was 17. Sorry everyone.)

I have a 3D printer, called Dawn (you'll meet her later) which I've had for about four years now, and I have a fair amount of experience in that too. 

I also have a lot of experience in coding and programming. Visual Basic, designing software and programs and video games. But I've never made anything IRL so this project would involve what I thought would be a small amount of learning.

The Premise

So what I want to do is build a Wheatley. I saw this person's website and I was super impressed with what they had accomplished. But their Wheatley is animated with a PS3 controller. So if you don't constantly animate it then it would appear lifeless. I want an interactive Wheatley. I want voice recognition where I would say "Wheatley, say hello" and he would go "Hello!" I want to call him a moron and him reply "I AM NOT A MORON!" I want to ask him to tell me a story and he would tell the story of what happened to Aperture Science between Portal 1 and 2, or he would tell me about how he almost got a job in manufacturing. 

The Story So Far

So I have been working on this for about a week now. I started with the sound files. I own the game on PC and I used a software called GCFScape to extract the sound files. It's very easy to use, it doesn't really require any explanations. I found the ~700 Wheatley voice lines and exported them all, and then spent several hours listening to every one and picking the lines for what I wanted. The lines are all recorded individually, so for example, when Wheatley tells you the story about disengaging from his management rail, this is like 10 separate clips. So I used Audacity to stitch together the sound files so I had one file for each output, which is what I want.

Next up was designing the 3D model. 

I started with the in-game model as a reference, and I build spheres and cut them where I needed them cut. This gave me the basic shell as shown above. (These photos are taken after I finished building the whole thing, sorry)

Then I designed the rest of the model such as the faceplate, the handles, the gear tracks along the top, bottom and sides. The gear tracks are for decoration only, they won't move or be used to move any part of the model.

For the eye, I really wanted a functioning aperture (science) so I downloaded and heavily modified this model from Thingiverse.

Here you can see a brief animation of the eye moving in Blender.

I had a lot of criteria for the iris eye. It needed a really low profile when open, which meant it also needed lots of leaves (the thin blade bits that open/close). The fewer leaves, the bigger they each have to be, and therefore the bigger the outer frame had to be to house them all. They also needed to overlap with each other so that the opening is always a circle, unlike some of the iris boxes on thingiverse. So I settled with this model.

In order to keep the circular shape from the front, I knew that the turning mechanism would have to be operated from behind. So I modified it to remove the screwholes and the toothed gear from the outside on the original, and added a cross-shaped arm structure from behind, onto which the servo would be mounted. This originally had one tooth that fitted into the front frame, but this whole design was very flimsy when printed, so I redesigned it as shown above, to have two teeth that fit between three teeth on the outer ring. Here's a close-up:

During the process of building the model I also looked at various microcontrollers and computer options. I don't really know what I am looking for but the person on the make-a-wheatley website used an Arduino Uno so I purchased a kit from Amazon which included a book and lots of additional components, to learn how to use it. I also purchased some servos and mini servos, which will control the motion of Wheatley.

Servos are small motors that only rotate 180°. They don't just spin, they move very precisely to exactly where you want them. Think about your elbow - it moves pretty much 180° along only one axis and you are able to move it to the precise position where you need it. This is what a servo does. Really they're ideal for moving animatronics and children's toys.

Once I had the servos I measured them, as I needed to design how they would mount within Wheatley. Here's what I came up with. The servos are marked in red.

The eye faceplate will need two servos at either side, to rotate it up and down (due to the weight of the faceplate rig) and one servo to turn it side to side. 

The eye needs one servo in the middle to turn the aperture, and one servo on either side to control each eyelid (I haven't yet designed any support arm for the eyelids). Because the eyelids pass between the eye and the faceplate ring above, the two structures have to be separate. The two 'wings' coming out at the top will slot into the two branches shown in the first photo and form this structure:

The servo on the far left and right attach to the outer walls of Wheatley, which will remain stationary and act as the "ground" from which all other movements will pivot. I will also need some micro servos to move eye handles but I haven't got that far into the design yet. I'm contemplating whether it's worth it?

I also needed a light for the eye. I looked at several, but eventually I had my heart set on this one, from Cool Components. It has 44 RGB LEDs and they are individually addressable, which means I can tell each light to do what I want, not just all 44 doing the same thing. Wheatley's eye doesn't do much, but the colours are not just solid blue. 

The light when it arrived.

Wheatley's eye is actually darker blue on the outside, then lighter blue towards the middle and finishing with white at the centre.

So this light does what I want perfectly! It allowed me to address the outer ring with a pure blue colour, then a lighter blue in the middle ring, with a value of (0, 94, 184) for RGB, and then the centre is not quite white, at (138, 138, 255) meaning that it's just very very light blue. It works perfectly. Pure white, I found, was too bright and washed out the rest of the colours.

I crudely used a piece of grease-proof paper initially, to test the diffuse of the light. I'm really pleased with the result!

Once I was satisfied with the light, I soldered the cables together and mounted into the back panel, using two small screws to hold it in place. I had never done any soldering before, apart from at school nearly 15 years ago, so I was a little nervous about setting my house on fire. But I did not.

With the light mounted, my next step was to work on the light diffuser. I ordered some light-diffusing sheets from Amazon and I also designed and 3D-printed a honeycomb mesh to go over the top, to create the illusion of far more pixels than there actually are.

The completed eye, with the diffuser and honeycomb mesh in place, along with the completed leaves and ring.

At this point I realised when trying to attach the servo that the whole thing was too tight. I initially printed it all in white PLA so I had to paint it, and I chose matt black spray paint. Unfortunately this added a lot of friction to the model, too much friction, and it also scuffed really quickly when turning it. You can see in the below video, which I also posted on Reddit, that it's actually quite tough to turn. 

Turning the ring is awesome, but also quite stiff

Once I mounted the servo in the back mechanism it just became too difficult to turn and the servo did nothing. I knew I had to rethink my design. There was an outer ring that clips over the top of the front disk (which moves) and is secured by clipping on to the back housing (which does not move). This was clearly too tight and was applying far too much pressure to the rotating disk. The arms, as I mentioned before, were also quite thin and flimsy, and had a very very small attachment area, and unfortunately it just wouldn't stay stuck down. so I designed new arms, which I showed above. I've printed the arms and fit them, but I haven't yet fitted the servo to see if it will move and how well. That's for the next blog post, if this catches on!!

Next Time

Next up is sanding down all of the leaves (again - I already did this for the white ones but had to reprint in black) so they are silky smooth and glide across each other. Then I will fit them all, and the ring, and glue it all in place and - hopefully - move it with a servo! It'll be so great to have that all come together. I'll update as soon as I'm able, if there's the interest for it!

Your Feedback

Please, if you're interested in this project, let me know! I've never used this site before but I believe you can comment, so let me know your thoughts. If you have any suggestions on how I can make it better, believe me - I am all ears. This is my first time doing something like this so we will see how it goes. Bye for now!