robot face?

Community General Discussions
1

Hi guys

I've now got to the point where I want to add a face to my robot, having got it moving, and detecting obsticals.

So, I've been looking around, and all the small displays I've found work at 3.3V but my nano is a 5V one :( and I dont want to have to put in a level converter aswell.

So, I was wondering what people are using as displays for robot faces and debug messages?

 

Thanks

dan

2

I2C

I2C requires pullup resistors. To play at 3.3V, you need have 3.3V on your device and attach the pullups appropiately.

3

**You could always make use of **

an LCD display. One of the multi-line versions should work nicely. You could get inovative and make a single line version work. They start(?) at 1 x 8 and go all the way to 4 x 20. Look for the HD44780 compatible displays. There are many libraries for them. If you do some searching, you can even find ways to drive them with as few as a single line; probably require more coding though.

4

I’d looked at

the Nokia 5110 LCD display, but that doesnt play nice at 5v apparently :frowning:

Idealy, I’d like to use a graphic display, since thats nice and easy for faces, and isnt too bad for text either.
I’ll take a look at some HD44780 compatibles

In my opinion, the less pins to drive it the better, but thats got to be balanced with skech size, since I’m running the whole robot off a single nano :) 

5

re: face

I’d put an old android smartphone / mp3 player on top and use it as a face.  You would likely get a light sensor, front and rear video cameras, gps, compass, wifi, etc., with enough processing power to run OpenCV and a brain.  It’s a great setup for animating a face, as the face can respond to light / video, blink, pupil dilation, whatever.

The graphics capabilities are the droids are endless including transparencies.  For example, I use a live video or sonar eyepiece that is partially transparent on mine.

You’ld need something that could do bluetooth or USB to tie it into the rest of your bot, so you might need to upgrade your microcontroller.

If you ever go that route and want some source to get started, drop me a line.