The coolest robot I've ever built!

computer can you hear me when I was a kid this is what the future looked like it wasn't just a world of computers it was a world of computer creatures these guys had personality they had a soul please call me Johnny Five they were going to be our friends our co-workers are enemies even our pets this is what we thought technology would be like someday and the future is fahir many of us already have a device sitting on our kitchen counter that talks to us the answers our questions that helps us get through our day and what does this amazing machine look like it looks like this don't get me wrong Alexa is great our family uses it every day but where is its personality I don't need another computer in my house we've got loads of those already I want a device that interacts with me I want a machine that feels like a character in the story of Our Lives So today we're going to try to solve this problem basically we're going to hack into one of the world's most popular virtual assistants add some animatronics add a screen from an old television see if we can make this machine feel a bit more alive let's get started thank you [Music] my wife has told me I can't buy anything here anymore but I told her that we were building a robot and we need parts so we better make this count [Music] time [Music] awesome [Music] so here it is one of the last generations of black and white CRT televisions ever produced we've got it all disassembled and ready for the next chapter of its life concept here is that we're going to use this television to help our creatures speak because when users can see a voice being produced when they can see a mouth moving we're going to be more inclined to believe that they're interacting with a creature that is self-aware yes you see frogs don't have ears you say a creature that has feelings our goal is to inspire people to forget that they are talking to a computer so let me show you what we've got going on here this is a pretty standard board for a small TV we've got our flyback Transformer here that provides high voltage up to the tube this transistor is on a big old heat sink and is most likely our horizontal output transistor and right over here we've got four lines coming out of the board that control the horizontal and vertical deflection on the screen and these are what we're most interested in to make this display work for us we're going to basically hijack the horizontal signal that's being sent to the tube and replace it with our own audio signal to do this we're going to desolder these two lines attach them to an audio amplifier and then connect the amp to our source and if we've done this right we should be able to see our audio come up on the screen [Music] [Music] cheese [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] mechanism I'm using a design developed by will coogley over at milheim mechatronics the beauty of Will's design is that it can be built quickly and cheaply with basically just an Arduino a handful of servos and a 3D printer he's got all the files available for download on his instructable and he's also got a really cool YouTube channel for animatronics I'll leave some links down below if you'll give this a shot [Music] so here we have it guys our eye mechanism up and running the servos as you can hear are still pretty jittery I think that's because the I don't have a power supply powerful enough for this yet actually the power supply itself is plenty powerful for it but I have to run it through this Buck converter to knock it down to 5 volts and this is limited to 3 amps and I think for six servos I think that's maybe not quite enough I'm hoping that's the problem so tomorrow I'll try to Source a better power supply and hopefully that will be a thing of the past I'm controlling the mechanism right now with this joystick this is just for testing purposes the eyes will actually be controlled by this little board this is a person sensor made by a company called useful sensors out of California you can get this on the SparkFun website I'll leave a link down below this is a self-contained face tracking camera unit I mean if you were really ambitious and had lots of free time you could of course program your own face tracking algorithm and pair that with a Arduino compatible camera but not only do I not have that much spare time my programming skills are just not up to that task what this lets us do is it lets our creature maintain eye contact with the user even if the user is moving around this means that she will not just be reacting when we talk to her like Alexa does but actually seeking out interaction watching you while you make dinner for example but in a friendly curious way like a child who wants to learn from you I think this is going to be really cool I want to take a moment and look at the Amazon Echo device itself because I think I see a problem here and the problem is this Alexa is designed so that when she hears the Wake word she knows to then listen for a question or command computer what is your favorite robot my favorite is bb-8 I really like how he rolls problem for us is that I don't want to have to tell our creature to wake up and then give her a command I want her eyes to respond the moment I say her name just like any creature would but I can't find a way to program Alexa so that she will send a signal as soon as she hears the Wake word she's designed so that you have to say the Wake word and then tell her what you want but I think I might have found a solution let me show you what I mean [Music] so this is our Alexa all disassembled this is our main chassis and speaker assembly this is our main board here's our 12 volts coming in right next to it is an audio output that we are not using at the moment and we've got this daughter board right here that has one very interesting feature when Alexa hears the Wake word she lights up these LEDs computer these three pads are tied to the red green and blue signals for the LED our meter tells us that the voltage at this pad drops from about 2.5 to 1.1 when the LED comes on so we're going to use a bit of soldering to tap into this voltage Supply solder a second wire as a ground reference and then connect it all to our microcontroller now when we say the wig word our microcontroller is programmed to sense this and activate whatever we tell it to activate without us having to give it any additional commands for now we'll just test with an LED computer yes now we just need some realistic looking eyes but I think that might be easier said than done [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] okay ran into a problem here when I put this resin on the retina area in preparation for putting it in the resin and mold um I heated it up to get the bubbles out and when I heated it up this it warped the eyeballs and as a result I can't get the eyeballs I can't get it back into this holder so that means that I can't use this mold I hope I can I hope these eyeballs will go back on the creature I don't know I think I have to abandon my eyeball plans I don't know what I'm gonna do about that actually so maybe we just push ahead with what we've got [Music] so now we've got to find a way to put all of these different parts together because we've got a TV that's in a disassembled State we've got an Amazon Echo device that's disassembled and we need to find a way to give this creature a body and I've got an idea when I was in third grade our school had an apple II computer I think it was an apple II e and this computer lived on a rolling cart and would get wheeled around to the different classrooms every week and none of us knew what to do with this machine so all the kids and all the teachers would basically just stare at it except for the one kid who would bring games and we'd all basically watch him play games but there is something unique about this particular machine the guy in charge of this machine had replaced the top panel with a clear plastic panel and this doesn't sound like a very big deal today but in 1984 it was huge because that was the first time that any of us had actually seen inside a computer before that it was like this magic box but now we could see there was engineering so in the spirit of that moment I had some clear acrylic sheets laser cut to some designs that I threw together in Fusion 360. and I'm hoping if my measurements are right that we can use these to sort of build a chassis for the creature to house all these different parts at least that's what I hope for [Music] she is [Music] got a couple more layers of the chassis built here this is essentially our TV board down in here and on top of it I had a piece cut around the heatsink and around the flyback Transformer so I could get it lower uh on the chassis to sort of conserve space [Music] [Music] okay guys it has been a long road to get here but I think we are getting close and I wanted to give you a quick tour of this thing before we try to turn it on I mean I've tested some of the I've tested all the systems independently though we haven't tested them all together yet and we're going to do that together here in just a second we've got our animatronics here with our eyes that actually didn't turn out bad you'll see not as good as I wanted but not bad this is our person sensor that will track our faces here's our speaker here's our two amplifiers here's the eight volts um boost converter and here's the 12 volt boost converter this is the television board down in here uh this is power for our amplifiers Amazon Echo device I actually wanted to have outside of its chassis just as a couple boards but it wasn't working right outside his chassis so some weird grounding thing so I just went ahead and stuck it back in there and whatever it's not the prettiest thing but it'll work this Transformer is for the television power supply I went ahead and put a separate CRT switch to turn on and off the tube because I was doing a lot of troubleshooting with some other other parts of this and I didn't want to have that thing on all the time this is our plug module with a fuse and a power switch this is our Arduino Mega used to be a nice small Arduino Nano but I burned that out putting too many volts to it so this is all I had left so I put a mega in there this is the servo board that drives all of these servos so it's been a long journey but uh I think we're ready to finally test this thing [Music] computer can you hear me yes I can hear you yes computer what was your special order [Music] what other priorities were sent computer are you alive artificially the same way that you're alive computer have you seen anything interesting in your life [Music] the darkness again all those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain ladies and gentlemen I am very excited to introduce you to my new friend Alexa Tron this is by far the most complicated build I've done to date I've spent the last three days like 15 hours a day just troubleshooting this Construction not to mention all the sourcing parts and all the previous component builds and all that and uh it's a bit buggy it's first of all it's pretty noisy the servos are really noisy and they're very jittery there's also a low speaker hum I don't know if you can hear that or not but it works and let's remember what this is It's a prototype it's a prototype that we can build on for future versions and the big change that I would like to see you guys have probably been yelling at the screen this whole time is that we need to dump the Alexa uh the Alexa platform and adopt a GPT AI platform because as far as interactivity goes it would be so much more powerful but I'm really happy with what it is and I've learned a ton on this project and this might be the coolest thing I have ever built computer what do you think thanks for watching everyone and I'll see you on the next one thank you thank you

Channel: Thomas Burns

Views: 4,535,813

Keywords: Robot, Mechatronics, Alexa, Amazon, Amazon echo, Echo, Crt television, Crt, Tv, Television, Animatronics, Animatronic eyes, Ai, ChatGPT, GPT, Maker, DIY, Electronics, DIY electronics, Arduino, Arduino Nano, Servo, Adafruit, Servo board, Acrylic, 3D print, 3D printing, Raspberry Pi, Microcontroller, Person sensor, Face sensor, Face tracking, Artificial intelligence, Amazon Alexa, Hack, Hacking, Soldering, Electricity, Vintage, Retro, Cathode ray tube, Johnny five, Johnny 5, R2D2, Tbilisi, robots

Id: bO-DWWFolPw

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023