Miss Princess Plugbot

I made Miss Princess for my 4 year old niece. She's a lot more interested in Princesses than robots, so I called it Miss Princess to trick her :)

There's a Battery Platform module on bottom - this powers the motors and logic. I added jumpers to Ms. Princess just in case I needed to split the power supply, but it runs fine with a shared battery. In the middle is a Propeller Platform and the miss Princess 'interface' pcb is on top.

More photos:

Miss Princess is heavily inspired Geir's switchboard car, although I made a few enhancements & tweaks. To operate it, you just flip it on (It goes through a brief wakeup animation). Each wire is numbered 1-10. Plug each wire into 'Action' headers, and when you press the big red GO button, the sequence plays out. Some of the available actions are:

Directions:
go forward
go back
go left
go right
turn around

and animations:
Dance (wiggle back and forth and whistle)
Hum (through the piezo speaker)
Wink (flash the LED eyes)
song (sing a song)

I had all the parts in stock except the motor mounts - I got those from solarbotics. they're actually pretty crappy when using the GM3 motor, there's only a hole for 1 screw, so it's a bit flimsy. Motors were slower than I expected, but they work.

Code was the easiest part - I just used the motor library from the Propeller Object Exchange. I have basic 'singing' in there, but I want to put in something more fancy (maybe a wav sample). Once I finish the code, I'll add it and also put up a video.

  • CPU: Parallax Propeller
  • Power source: 4 AAA Cells
  • Programming language: Spin
  • Sensors / input devices: momentary pushbuttons

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/miss-princess-plugbot

very tidy
very tidy

I love it. Nice to see
I love it. Nice to see another Propeller based robot here.

Great to have inspired
Great to have inspired someone J<o:p></o:p>Your version dose much more than mine and looks great! I see you have a ‘heat rib’ on your motor controller chip. Where do they sell them? Mine gets really hot after running for a while.<o:p></o:p>Great Work !<o:p></o:p>

IC Chip Heat Sink

I have ordered a few from here:

http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=HS179-ND

Just clip them on.

Thanks!

I got my heatsink from Jameco. Use a little thermal grease to improve heat transfer if it’s having problems. I added

I have to admit, using the prop almost feels like cheating - I just grabbed the h-bridge object from the obex, and all the available I/O made for a trivial circuit. I want to do something a little more taxing for the audio out though - reading the last chapter of the new Propeller book has got me thinking about voice synthesis.

@meringu - I tried to keep it as tidy as possible because I didn’t want anything to poke / break / zap / etc. I also wanted it to look ‘friendly’ and not like a nest of wires. It’s part of the way there, but there’s more I could do.