Vacuum teardown

I spent most of the long weekend at the beach or doing projects around the house. Not much robot building was done.

I picked up a vacuum cleaner at a flea market to motorize for the Rosie project. After it was completely disassembled I found out how nasty a used vacuum can be. So all the parts were thoroughly scrubbed and disinfected.

It looks like the best way to motorize it will be to completely rebuild the bottom part of the vacuum and just use the top piece of the base and the upright handle piece. I probably won't get around to that for a few weeks.

A new robot in the house

Before reading this entry, I've arranged for proper theme music. Click here (You'll need to stretch the imagination to get through this blog entry)

Yesterday while browsing a store with some co-workers at lunch, I found some type of household container that looked a lot like Rosie's head so I bought it. It was pretty reasonable. So now officially we have a new robot in the house.

So it only seemed fitting to introduce her to the other robots in the house. B9 was very cordial while Bender cracked some crude jokes. The creature plain didn't want her there and made it perfectly clear that there was no place in here for a female robot. That caused a great argument between him and the Jawa so I just left.

At a local flea market I found several vacuum cleaners that would be right for this project but still haven't picked up one yet. It has to be as light as possible with enough room to mount a drivetrain and possibly a large battery with an inverter. Speaking of drivetrain, it's making progress.

Another robot project that has been moving along this week is the B9 end table. We ordered a piece of glass for it today. Only thing I need to do now is finish the donut and waist plate

Drive train

If you're interested in learning about Robotics then you may be interested in the fact that radio shack is closing out their Vex line of robotics. Everything is half off which is amazing. A starter kit is now only $149.00 which includes a lot of parts ... like an erector set on steroids. I stocked up this week on the sale items because it looks like another company bought Vex out and the original prices will stand after radio shack closes the line the beginning of June. The manual that comes with the kit is very easy to read and it just makes a lot of sense. There's cheaper ways to learn robotics but I'm glad I chose the Vex method.

So today I began working on the Rosie drive train. Actually the plan is to motorize a vacuum cleaner and get it to move and respond to my commands via a remote control. I will attach Rosie's hand to the vacuum and it will look like she's pushing it around the house. So phase 1 is to create a remote controlled vacuum cleaner. The first experiment will try to get it to work as a functioning vacuum cleaner. If the vacuum proves to be too heavy then I'll gut the motors and parts and just add an audio track of a vacuum running. Either way there's going to be a vacuum cleaner racing down my street soon.

Back to the Vex robotics being closed out at Radio Shack. One of the salespeople said that not enough young people were interested in the kits. He was a young man about 21. That's a subject that has been bothering me lately. It seems that our society is being seduced by video games, Cable TV and the internet. And that's bad. It doesn't seem like kids are interested in building or creating things any more. I hope I'm wrong but even though there will always be young builders, their numbers are dwindling fast. Do your kids a favor. Turn off the internet in your home or limit it. Limit the amount of time to sit in front of the great American drug - television. And do what you can to limit your kids video game play.

BTW, I just read that 61% of children under the age of ONE (1) !!! watch TV on a regular basis and 1/3rd of all children. 19% of children one year or younger have a TV in their room. 29% of 2-3 year olds have a TV in their room.

Another article I just read said SAT Science scores are way down. Gee..... no wonder. Didn't George Orwell write that book 1984 in which the population was made complacant by getting their daily drug to make them happy. I think it was called SOMA. Well, he was pretty close to the mark - instead of SOMA, he should have called it TV.

Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons

That robot building bug is back. I'm going to look into building a life size Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons cartoon. I don't think it's ever been done before.

Instead of being a static statue, She's going to move around the house as under her own power contolled with a RC (radio control) unit. She will be pushing a vacuum. Rosie was inevitable because it seemed like every woman that sees our robots asks if I'm going to make "one of those Jetson Rosie the Robots". That's usually after they give my wife a sympathetic look after surveying the robotic landscape of our home.

So .... Phase one will be designing a robotic Rosie drive train. I have some really good ideas in this area that I can't wait to experiment with.

Robot end table

The Robot End table is another project that I need to finish so I can focus on rewiring and finishing my B9. I've been filling in the knees with spot putty, sanding and glue the styrene to mdf knee plates. These parts are actually good enough to be used on a B9. I'm going to have legs, knees, donut and waist plate and the top will have a light illuminating up through it. Not positive how it will look but it should fit in in the robot room.

Ohm's law

Spent a little time playing around with an adjustable voltage regulator and making calculations with ohm's law. I have a lot of electrical tasks on the B9 that needs to be done. Definately not my strong suit but I'll figure it out.

Got to get the linear motion of the arms working and the radar unit/brain needs to start moving.

Robot party

We expected Bender to mix things up around here a little but were unprepared for what we found when we woke up Saturday morning. I thought I heard some singing in the night and once there was a loud crash but it was one of those times where I thought I was dreaming and just went back to sleep.

So when we get up, we discovered that it got kind of wild around here last night. All the robots were pretty tanked and the creature had a cigar in his mouth. The funniest thing was the Jawa and the B9 singing together. I think they did it more to tick off Bender because he kept telling them to shutup. I have to say though, I never saw the Jawa in a better mood.

I guess some good came of it because the B9 taught Bender and the Jawa how to play Chess. The creature didn't want to learn but had fun heckling them from the sidelines. Other than the ashes on the floor and a couple of spilled beers, nothing else was damaged. The crash I heard was the B9 falling down when he got in a chugging contest with Bender. One of his side vents came out so I'm going to have to repair him later. He kept murmuring something about his circuits being foggy.

The only robot that didn't get in trouble was R2D2. He still doesn't trust Bender and isn't influenced by him at all. Thank God there's a little piece of sanity around this house !!!!

Now to clean this mess up.....

Mom's old fashioned robot oil

Of course everyone knows you need to have a good stock of Mom's old-fashioned Robot Oil to keep your robots humming. Even though Futurama is in the year 3000 and the B9 Lost in space robot is from a 20th century robot, I checked and the oil is compatible with both robots.

The Warning label on the side says "WARNING NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION" Contents under pressure keep away from open flame. Made from 100% grade "A" worm oil. Mom says "Change your oil every 3000 miles".

Thanks again to Kim n Cris for the graphic. I took the graphic and overlaid it on another graphic of the solid blue color. That way I wouldn't have to paint the can. A little spray adhesive and the can in my robot junk box turns into a cool looking can of Robot Oil.

Robot beer

Bender just wasn't content with Budweiser so I searched high and low to get him his favorite beer. Thanks to Kim and Cris at http://www.kimncris.com for their help in this matter.

Good Robot / Bad Robot

Toasting completion of Bender

Got a lot done today and even had time to finish Bender despite a few setbacks. I had a lot of trouble with the feet and had to scrape all the goop off them because there was some chemical reaction with the paint and rubber and they were always sticky. I tried several different sealers without luck and ended up having to use my dremmel to clean them up. It was a mess. I finally sprayed on a coat of aerosol rubber and then painted over that. That worked. I tried a slew of other primers and sealers with no luck prior.

The base he stands on was laminated with styrene and then painted with hammered gold. Casters were added so it will be easy to wheel him around. I should have put the casters on months ago with all the shuffling around the garage we did.

With my wife's suggestion, I redid the fingers using a pair of heavy rubber gloves. I cut 3 fingers out and dyed them with a great dye that I used for my B9 legs. You can dye anything with this stuff - you just spray it on.

The legs and arms got a fresh coat of paint and I painted the area where the legs attach to the torso.

There still a few minor details to attend to with the hands and shoulders (touch up) but other than that, we now have a life sized Bender.

Even though this project was much harder than I imagined, I'm glad I did it. Time to catch up on all the projects around the house I let slip by over the last couple of months and take a break (a small one) from robot building.

In the next week or so I'll post more pictures how some of the parts go together on my Bender.

Final details and then a beer

I resanded Bender's Torso but this time I used my orbital sander being very careful not to go through the styrene. I was able to smooth out a lot of places that just didn't look right. After doing all this work, no sense in having flaws all over the place.

So today was also a day of completing a lot of smaller tasks. I completely redid the wrists. Yesterday I fiberglassed and bondoed them pretty good and used the table belt sander to smooth them out. Then a layer of styene was added to the front and a lot of spot putty layers were applied and sanded. After all that a nice coat of hammered silver and the wrists look great. I cut the hole in the top of the styrene with a hole saw.

On top of the door you could see the thin styrene and if you got close to Bender and looked down, it didn't look good. So I tried a bunch of calk for that area to build it up but all the caulk I had was old. So after pitching those in the trash, I mixed up some of this two part quikplastik stuff. Great for making a plastic / epoxy putty repair. After kneading it, I rolled it into a bead and laid it on top of the door. After getting my fingers wet, I was able to smooth it out on a bevel and it worked perfect. Now the door looks like a heavy duty metal door instead of a piece of flimsy styrene. This epoxy dries hard and is very tough. After it dried, I shot some paint on it and that was checked off the list.

The only thing I have to do now is to clean up the legs and feet and add a little paint. That will require taking Bender off the stand because I also need to finish the stand he's on.

Tomorrow he will be done and we will all open a beer to celebrate (Bender will have his own beer) Then I'll bring him in the house to join the other robots and creatures.

Smokin !!!!!

My back's been a little messed up so I haven't been doing as much building. But today I had to get something done so I worked on the Bender Hands and also perfected the mouth and made a magnetic cigar.

I think I mentioned my wife suggested making the cigar magnetic and putting a piece of metal under the mouth. That worked like a charm. I superglued a small magnet under the cigar after screwing a 3" drywall screw into the cigar. The drywall screw was the support for the magnet to stick to on the cigar.

I also bought a can of Budweiser and am making the hands adaptable to hold a can of beer. Budweiser will do for now until I can get something more Benderish. Any suggestions?

He still needs some detail work but he will be ready to come in the house to meet the other robots this weekend. It will be interesting to see how he gets along with the star wars Jawa and the B9.