After building some construction on the garden my 4 year old daughter and I built a small robot of some spare wood planks π¨ I've tried to explain to her that daddy builds robots at his work ... perhaps not entirely accurate though π So quite naturally thinking we'll need to give this robot a brain π‘ .. this might be a fun DIY (Do It Yourself) project that might be fun and share for inspiration π
While my daughter have her boxes with toys so did luckily her dad .. so was just a matter start using the soldering iron .. I'll explain below what items were needed and how to glue these together, if you feel uncomfortable soldering you may instead purchase a breadboard instead. The cost for such project shouldn't have to cost more than a 10 euros which I personally is not too shabby for a talking/seeing wifi-connected robot πΈ π
And finally I'll have written some MicroPython π for those who doesn't know is a Python implementation optimized to run on microcontrollers.
Thanks to ESP32 capacitive touch GPIOs we can pull a wire to e.g. a screw/coin that is able to sense touches instead of using mechanical buttons. We have the following buttons that tells the robot the following
- Button 1 - play hide'n seek
- The robot will ask you to stand in the middle of the room and will challenge you to be as still as you can for 30 seconds. If the robot find your movement it wins otherwise you will..
- Button 2 - tell time and day
- The robot establishes connection to Wifi and connects to WorldClock API cycling between saying what day it is or what hour of the day it is (CET)... I thought of introducing "it is bedtime for you now".
- Button 3 - tell what weather it is outside
- The robots use Wifi and connects to api.met.no to determine the weather based on the WEATHERLOCATION defined and reads wether is sun, rain, cloud, thunder and so on.
- Button 4 - reads out the magic word
- "poop"
- Button 3 + 4 simultaneous - wifi and webrepl
- If you like to have the robot connect to your wifi and enable webrepl that allows you to e.g. interactively control the robot and upload/download files.
You can check out this video to see what the result might look like..
| ο»ΏItem | appr. Cost (EUR) | URL to item |
|---|---|---|
| mini-slide-switch | 0,05 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32807751467.html |
| 0,5 ohm speaker | 0,5 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32814341548.html |
| jq6500 | 1,5 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32718352583.html |
| PIR (SR501) | 0,8 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32243592989.html |
| ESP32 | 3,5 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32928267626.html |
| 10u capacitor | 0,5 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000096483128.html |
| wires | 0,5 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32969382424.html |
| 9v battery holder | 0,2 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32837950993.html |
| 2 pcs green leds | 0,2 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32999447594.html |
| 2 pcs 200 ohm resistors | 0,2 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32868810758.html |
| PCB board | 0,2 | https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32961983574.html |
| spare wood, nails/screws | for free(?) | |
| Total cost | 9 |
You have the sketch and wiring found under the docs directory..
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Follow these instructions to upload MicroPython to your ESP32
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Update the following lines in main.py
# Configure your wifi
WIFI_SSID = 'xxxx'
WIFI_PASS = 'xxxx'
# Used to tell what the weather it is
WEATHERLOCATION = 'lat=57.8813&lon=13.784'- Upload the following files to the ESP32 flash using e.g. ampy described better here.
- jq6500.py
- main.py
Connect the jq6500 module to available USB and it will open a "downloader" (on Windows) and you can then upload all prompts found in the "voice_prompts" folder, I'd suggest you come up with your own voice prompts unless you'd like to keep these swedish ones and you'd pretty much find what being said in the code
# Slot in JQ6500 vs voice prompt mapping
MyVoices = namedtuple('MyVoices', 'welcome '
'i_see_you '
'now_we_play '
'instruct_hide '
'now_stand_still .....')
# and so onMore details and hints could be found here.
Well .. obviously a few minutes after introducing this to her she says "Dad ... when will it have arms and legs being able to clean my room ?!?!" So turns out we have some work ahead of us, already begin thinking of hydraulics and how to embed this to its GPIOs π