Cheesoid

"Why Cheesoid exist?"

Mitchell & Webb: Cheesoid

An unhappy robot designed to have a sense of smell but can only distinguish between its two operating modes: "CHEESE" and "PETROL".

Thoughts

Everybody loves robots: It's your plastic pal who's fun to have around! I'd like a robot too, and I'm going to build one goddamnit!!!

As with everything I want to build, it must be funny, and so Cheesoid is the ideal blueprint to follow.

It has (should have) speech limited to a number of pre-recorded phrases: -

• "Cheese"
• "Petril"
• "Help! Cannot see! Can only smell!"
• "Why Cheesoid exist?"
• etc.

Basic Construction

I have a cardboard cylinder (slightly smaller than the original) and a silver "nose hose". The nose hose will contain a bent rod that will be rotated by a servo or stepper motor. The robot can run on top of a R/C car to begin with. The donated R/C car at the space has no battery and I couldn't get the motor to run!

I plan to cover Cheesoid in silver-grey paper.

The nose hose needs to be mounted in a shallow box which in turn is fixed to the body.

The "CHEESE" or "PETROL" mode switch must be authentic!

Voice capability will just be some sort of recordable button box.

Object detector (that initiates the smelling process) would be awesome.

The ability to actually distinguish between the smell of cheese and petrol would be crazy-awesome!

Need: -

• R/C vehicle
• silver-grey paper or card
• nose rod and motor
• voice
• lamp eyes - one red, one green
• flashing LEDS
• automation!!!

Tasks

• get to grips with random recovered stepper motors
  • This one is especially useful - taught me enough to proceed: http://www.stepperworld.com/Tutorials/pgUnipolarTutorial.htm
  • http://www.piclist.com/techref/io/stepper/..%5Csteppers.htm
  • http://www.instructables.com/id/Drive-a-Stepper-Motor-with-an-AVR-Microprocessor/
  • http://wwwhomes.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/stepper/others/

The stepper motor I found turns out to be a Unipolar. It has 6 wires, 2 for the centre taps which should go to V+ and two each for the grounds of the half coils.

I identified the usage of the wires using my cheap multimeter and measured the half coil resistances: 36.9 ohms, 36.6 ohms, 36.7 ohms, 36.7 ohms.

• get to grips with servos and R/C in general
  • http://www.societyofrobots.com/

• make cheesoid voice recordings
  • download FLV of youtube video and extract audio - DONE
  • slice and dice with audacity - DONE
  • investigate robot voice changers and try to get the Robert Webb voice perfect
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_Speech_Synthesis_System

--Michael Erskine 16:38, 3 May 2011 (BST)