Head

 

While I am waiting for the Eye's PCB to arrive, I thought it best to start designing the head.

I want the head to be able to rotate continually in a direction, so I will be adding a slip ring to the base of the neck to pass wires through from the main body.

The slip ring enables the wire to be rotated without getting tangled up.

I want the head to nod as well as rotate, I will be using two small geared 6 volt motors.

To control these two motor I am using a cut down driver board I made for the Arms.

As I am using DC motors I need to make some thing to give feedback as to the position of the neck rotation and nod position.

To do this I am going to make similar sensors I used with the Arms.

I will be using Magnets and the 3144 Hall Effect Sensors.

For the Neck Plate on which every thing rotates, I have placed Magnets all around the edge.

I set the magnets in place with UV glue, this is a resin, so when it cured I was able to sand it down to a smooth even surface the 3144 Hall Effect Sensor could rest upon..

Next was the base of the head, I want the head to be able to look up and down.
This part also needs limit switches, so that the base of the head does not hit the rotation platform.

The rotary platform also requires a sensor to detect when looking forward, so that this position can be set.

I have done a simple program to check some of its movements so far.

Here's a video I made testing its movements:

Added a few parts:

Added some teeth hehe:

I have finished the Eyes PCB. Here: TIM-01 Eyes.

Now I want to add some Eye Brows.

I incorporated an Auxiliary switch into the Eyes PCB, so that I could add a solenoid to move the Eye brows.

The Eyebrows pivot on a wire spindle and are lifted by wires attached to a solenoid inside the head.

The head has a lot of functions to control, in my Bluetooth controller application, I have divided things into three:

• Head Movement

The next two, I thought I would try and emulate the actual devices.

• Eyes

• Mouth

Also with the last two, I wanted to get the text to look as it does on the devices.

I thought I would have to make two fonts, but as it turned out both the 2x16 LCD and the Nokia screens have the same font.

So I only had to create one font.

If anyone would like a copy of the font, it's here: Tims_8x6_Matrix.ttf

So far I have only done ASCII characters 32 to 127.

The 2x16 screen is the Chinese version, (Character Patterns - ROM Code: A00) which has Chinese characters after ASCII number 61. There are no characters between ASCII 127 and 60.

As for the Nokia Screens, I have only created ASCII characters 32 to 126 in the Arduino Library I made for the TIM-01 EYES.

Time fore a video demonstration.