Saturday, April 27, 2013

Carnac-Style Robot for the Adafruit 6 Seconds Competition

As posted the other day, I had an idea for the Adafruit 6 seconds competition.


Fortunately it used parts I already had:

The hookup was a bit of a challenge as the breakout only supports a 4 pin SPI interface at 3.3 volts  with the Adafruit library.  The included CD4050 chip translates the signal levels to 5 volt for the Uno.  The EMIC 2 communicates over a TTL serial used with the Arduino softserial library to keep the standard serial port free for debugging over USB.  The audio signal is amplified via a vintage Radio Shack hobby speaker.  The mouth moves via a servo.  I burned out my original trying to make the movements match the speech so I went to Microcenter to get a replacement microservo with metal gears for ruggedness.

Then it was time to come up with a good Carnac-type joke ("Carnac" says answer, card contains question to make the punch line).  So the one I picked was:

Answer: "Groundhog"

Question: "What's in Sausage?"   (oh, groan!)

Many of the classics were pretty dated.  This is not a direct joke Carson used, I modified it to make it more 6 second friendly and avoid copyright, if any.

I'm thankful the servo was the only real issue.  Rather fun project.  I'll post the code on github when I get it cleaned up.



With Intro graphics:

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