AVERe
Audionic Videotronic Electronic Robotic, eh!
Robots can be your friends. Your friends can be robots.
I’ve been wanting to make a robot costume for Halloween for quite some time. For Halloween of 2004, I finally went ahead and did it. Instead of building a cumbersome cardboard box to wear and do the robot, I decided to just build a helmet and wear a shiny silver jogging outfit. Funny thing is that I didn’t finish the costume until well into the morning, missing any parties that were happening. Or at least all of them I knew of. That’s ok though, I had fun. Next year, I plan to actually wear it.
Ok, so, you want to build a robot helmet? Here’s a possible parts list:
Laptop with audio input (just need the logic board, drive, battery)
My First Sony karaoke tape player (cheap at thrift stores, like $1)
Samsung micro-cassette recorder (to send audio to the laptop)
Sony PSOne LCD Display
Cardboard, or some other easily cut and glued material
Foam for padding
Twisty ties
Hot glue gun and lots of glue sticks
Spray paint in desired robot helmet color
Screen material for speaker grille and for your eyes to see through
Thin plexiglas to protect the LCD screen
Various cables and adapters found and made
Misc bolts to hold on the speaker, or just more hot glue
This is definitely looking mostly like a list of the old things you find in the back of your kitchen drawer, no? Well, maybe besides the plexiglas and the laptop. And maybe the karaoke thing.
Ok, anyway, you have this desire to be a robot. Cardboard is good stuff. My
studio classes from architecture school really shine through in the fabrication of robot skulls. Hot glue guns are your friend. Funny thing about glue guns is that I always thought they seemed really annoying and I didn’t try them until after college. Hot glue is one of my favorite ghetto tools now. Right up there with duct tape.
The specifics before building that I wanted to keep in mind were: an LCD display that I wanted people to be able to see, a speaker that I wanted people to be able to hear, a mic I had to be able to talk into, and a head that I had to fit into the thing once complete. I started by making a frame for the LCD as I wanted to make sure not to damage it. I even went so far as to lay a thin plexiglass sheet in front to protect the LCD panel.
Then I set this face down on the table and started attaching other shapes on, sticking my head on the table every once in a while to make sure something would be far enough away from me, or that it would fit one of the items. For example, the recorder is attached in such a way that it juts out to the left of the main shape. This was fine with me as I didn’t really want the whole form to be symetrical.
To test fit for the back angles, I had my digital camera on a tripod and used the remote to take shots of what I could not see.
Most Halloween costumes just have a shape, a form. I wanted a robot costume with function as well. So besides looking kid of weird, I had the idea to have a computer (which happened to be in pieces at the time) modulating my voice in a robot kind of way. I realized about two microns later (yeah, I know that’s length) that I could use the screen from my toy laptop and also give my robot a smiling face. Obviously, I just was not in a party mood.
In my helmet, the voice comes in through the Samsung microcassette recorder, with the tape paused. I just realized that the microcassette recorder could have just been a cheapo mic, or even a USB mic. I think I had a specific reason for using the microcassette, but I’m guessing it was availability at 4 in the morning. This audio input goes into my laptop and into a program called Plogue Bidule. This program can route audio through filters and equalizers and all sorts of things. So I played around for a while and came up with something kind of robotic.
After the laptop, the sound gets piped into the hacked apart karioke tape player. I wired the switch to just turn the machine on and off. I figured if I coughed, I didn’t need to robotocize that. I also had no idea how long the batteries would last.
Below is an image of the circuit board for the karioke tape player. You can see from the first one that there are multiple wires coming off of the board that I needed to deal with. On the left there is the audio input coming from the computer, and the switch to turn on and off the power. On the far right is the speaker connection, and coming off the bottom right is the power.
Next is an image of the battery connections. Luckily, this board was quite specific in it’s markings. That made it much easier to deal with. Here you can see that the positive was on the left and that my soldering job was not so great. I remember that left solder point just never holding. It took forever for it to stay like it did.
Just connect these wires to a battery holder that gets velcroed or hot glued somewhere out of the way, probably across from the laptop to balance things out. I used the same amount and kind of batteries as the device took initially using a battery holder from Radio Shack (part 270-396).
Here is the speaker connection. The speaker wires had to be elongated to be able to reach from where this board is located. Just snip the speaker wires in the middle so that you can tell which color goes where.
This next one is kind of hard to see. The black wire is connected to a point marked GND for ground. To get audio into the board, you will need one wire connected to here and the other connected to the place marked SIG for signal. The wires for audio came from an end of a stereo headphone jack cable. Since I only had mono inputs on the karioke board, I just connected the left and right leads together when soldering onto the board. This gave a cheap and easy mono input. If you wanted to, you could have two speakers in the helmet aiming a bit away from the front center and make sure the laptop was outputting some highly stereo effects. That could be very impressive. I might even do that for next halloween. The only thing here would be to see if the batteries could power two boards at once.
To hook up the switch (any switch that will stay on after you flick or press it), you also use the ground connection, but then hook up the other side to the CTRL, or control point.
Here is an image of the viewing area where my eyes were looking out. I wanted it to look something like a vent or neck divider or something. Anything so that it wouldn’t draw your eyes to it. I ended up using two layers of light plastic screen material like you might use for a window. I could still see out pretty well, and it made it less obvious that there was actually a human in the costume.
Here is an image of the speaker bolted into the top section of my helmet. Any time you can use real hardware like bolts, sheet metal, fans, or anything a real robot might have, it makes the effect that much better. On the very top you can see the wires and a piece of a fan that I install into the top. My thinking here was partially for effect, but mostly because I didn’t want to be in an uncomfortable outfit for very long. Turns out the box is large enough compared to my head that there was airflow.
Below are a couple images of the bottom front of the helmet showing placement of the voice input, some of the construction details of the eye piece, and the general mess you can have going on inside as long as you pay attention to the outside.
Related Links:
Plogue Bidule
Troikatronix Isadora
Radio Shack battery holder for 4 “D” Cells (part 270-396)