An even BIGGER update!

A lot has changed in the last few weeks! I'm sorry I didn't update sooner.

Electronics

I've really struggled with my EasyVR and my Music Maker shields stacked atop one another, and eventually I ruined my EasyVR trying to change the pinouts. There's two teeny tiny resistors on the back that you can allegedly move and re-solder in order to change the pins that the EasyVR uses. I needed to do this because the Music Maker shield and the EasyVR use the same pins - 12 and 13. (The Music Maker uses several more, but the EasyVR only uses two). But doing this was a bloody nightmare, I don't think I really have the equipment to do it because they're so small, and I burnt the board and was unable to solder across the holes, it was just a nightmare honestly. I had to order another one, but the problem remains that I cannot work out how to have two shields on one Arduino. So therefore we couldn't communicate between them easily.

Now I say easily - I am sure there is some way to tell your Arduino to "talk to this shield" and then "ok now talk to this one". There simply must be. It's something to do with shield selectors. Dunno what they are, tried to look it up, couldn't find anything particularly helpful on this subject. So, what is easier is two arduinos with a shield on each. This great idea was suggested by Evan, the creator of Bottango, which I will be using to animate Wheatley. There is a Discord channel which you can access through the Bottango website. What a great group of people!! And it WORKS!

Back Drum and supports

I needed a way to fit the model together. It's not enough to just print it. I designed a system where the four rails, at the top, bottom and sides of the model, interlock with the four body quadrant panels which I wrote about before - here are the side rails being fitted:

The orange bits are because I ran out of black, grey and white filament!

So the black round drum piece is in the back of the model. I attached the two orange arms, which are the sides of Wheatley, and then onto that I attached the black side rails which you can see above.

And then from there I attach the grey side panels. The top and bottom rail get glued to one side panel each and then I should be able to fit all the pieces together.

Hello!

And it works! They actually snap together incredibly well, to the point that it's very difficult to get them to come apart again even without any glue. It honestly couldn't have gone better.

In future videos, although it will look fully assembled, I've only glued the two bottom panels into place. The top two panels will just rest on the model for photos and videos, and will be glued in as the last step in the build, because if I need to get inside it for any reason, it'll be much easier to do whilst it's unassembled! It's not impossible to access the insides after it's assembled, but I think it's a good idea to keep it easily accessible.

Painting

So I needed to paint it. I couldn't assemble it before painting it. So following above I had to snap it all apart. Then:

First I sprayed it all with grey primer. It is super matte and looks really cool. In this photo I've also gone over it all with white primer too, which is why it looks so inconsistent - it's supposed to!

I thought after priming it with grey and a splash of white primer, it looked perfect and doesn't really need any further work on painting the body This is how it will be left!

Then I wanted to paint the rails, so I spent a long time masking them all off

Apologies for the state of my hand. I was impatient and just held stuff as I sprayed it. I would not recommend that.

And then I sprayed it with a gun metal spray I've had for yonks:

The end result looks great!

So I'm overall very pleased with how well all the painting has gone. After I've glued all the side quadrant panels on to the body, I will need to go over it again unfortunately, to make it consistent. Although the body is printed in four panels, it's actually supposed to be two panels that just wouldn't fit on my printer. So I will have to fill the gaps at the sides and then repaint it, but that's fine - I didn't want to attach them unpainted, so this is all according to my plan.

Eyelids

I also needed to finally take a look at the eyelids. If I had one thing I could change, it would be rushing ahead with the model before it was finished. I did though, and because of that, the eyelids were an afterthought and the handles even more so - I have only designed them as an absolute last minute thing, and they could have been much better. I'm quite disappointed with them.

If you remember, I had to turn the eyelid servos around from the original design:

The current design, with the eyelid servos sticking outwards and long silly arms stretching to the eyelids

Especially the top eyelid which has a ridiculously shaped arm because of having to go around the front faceplate support. But it gets worse - I miscalculated the height of the servos - by 3mm! I'm so annoyed about this. So I had to print some height-rising support blocks for the servo which I have had to painstakingly glue to the housing, shown below:

The four little orange blocks support the servos to point outwards

So this works but then do you want more bad news? I thought so. One of the blocks on the right-hand side of the photo above slipped out. It still held the servo up just fine, but as you can see, it's very close to the iris arm on the right-hand side, and well, it slipped in such a way that the iris arm collided with it, preventing rotation and possibly damaging the model if it stayed there. So I've had to disassemble it all and remove the two servo support blocks. I've now designed this:

Coloured in orange

And this won't slip out of position, I promise! I hope... It's next to me printing right now.

Even more bad news again? I thought so. In my stupidity and excitement, I managed to burn out a servo for one of the eyelids. Fortunately this is easily replaced but it's a pain. But it's got me scared - if I burn out the servo for the eye iris, that is a bugger to remove. It requires getting inside the light fitting, and removing the honeycomb mesh and light diffuser, then the LED ring itself, to finally remove a screw underneath which releases the servo. I'm not too excited about that.

The handles

Ok so I have been putting of these bloody handles for WEEKS. I just didn't want to do them but I have no choice now, because in order to go ahead with animating him, I need the handles attached.

Here's a photo of them:

As you can see, they are also unpainted.

The servos are teeny tiny, about the size of my finger, and they are actually built into the handle. So the handle will turn with the servo, and the servo horn will be fixed in place to the model. You can see the small orange caps I have printed and glued to the holes on the body, and then you can see the servos plugged into them (small black things). They're going to be painted grey like the body so they will look like part of the model by the time I'm done. They just feel flimsy. The rest of the model is very robust and solid but the handles are NOT at all. I'm concerned they won't even move. They're actually so small that I am having to cut the head off the cable and solder in three separate cables so that it's big enough to plug into my Arduino because at the moment it is not. But I also have to do that whilst the servos are in situ, because the cables are small enough to poke through the servo arm whereas the soldered cables will not. I cannot overstate how small these things are.

Final Thoughts

But all is not lost - check out this video of him working! At the moment the animation is very simple, he only blinks and twists his eye. There's no talking yet or any other movement of the face, but it's a great demo of how the final product will look. (I'm also going to work on the wobble.)

What do you think?

He has come such a long way!!

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