Thursday, January 10, 2008

Some Threepio Progress...arms and messing around with motion activated lights and sound.

OK..I recorded TK409's intro into my voice box and spliced together a motion sensing night light with Threepio's rice light eyes. I taped one of the lights to my motion activated voice box..so the plan is when the motion activated lights go off...they activate the voice box. Cheesy setup..but ti seems to work.



I want to try to wire these up to a remote controled outlet...so I can power this up and down remotely..in case this works too well and threepio starts talking all the time during a movie.

I had to feed 6 volts to a circuit for the motion sensing night lights..that was designed for 4.5 volts. That being the case I may have to then feed 6 volts to the voice box too..and cross my fingers it doesn't blow!

Here is a rough video I took with my camera. The voice box doesnt pla as loud as I would like so it's really tough to hear in this video...but follow the link in the post below this one and you will hear it! TURN SPEAKERS UP!!!!!




Here are some pics of the progress I have made on Threepio's body. Just to get the arms in this state has been a lot of work with a heat gun, glue, filler, sanding, priming, painting. I am painting everything with the cheapo gold paint I can buy here, and the final coat is the expensive paints I had shipped from England. The torso in the picture below is just normal paint so hopefully you can see how much better things look once that special paint is applied. Obviously the torso in the picture below is not done.





3 comments:

Calvin Thomas said...

Lookin good !!!
That gold is very shiney, Alot better than the paint I've found.
An idea for the volume problem,
Radio Shack has a small amplifier for headsets. You could wire it into the speaker line and it would be pretty loud.
Calvin

SuperDad said...

thanks for the idea man. Ive actually been discussing this on the astromech factory and may have a solution. I can run the lights and voice box at 6volts...so apparently I can get a small amplifier that runs off 6 volts too...and I'll just use a slightly larger speaker..probably from a pc speaker.

Is that the kind of amp you are thinking??? Thanks man!

Jason

Calvin Thomas said...

No, I have 1 for my MP3 player.
It's fairly small and has an input line and 3 output ports.
It runs on 2 AA batts. and it can get pretty loud.
Calvin