Wednesday, May 14, 2008

I made a robot's head

Every once in a while I realize I've got too much junk. This realization usually comes after I've had said junk for a while and when I decided to toss out a pile of junk, there was a smaller pile that I couldn't bring myself to toss. The pile had some parts from a couple of old camcorders, random motors and lights, an old joystick from an old arcade game, and some buttons and switches.

I didn't want to toss this stuff, but at the same time I didn't quite know what to do with it, but I decided that I'd have to make use of it or toss it. I started looking at two parts, a viewfinder and a lens from two different camcorders and thought they looked like eyes, so I decided to make a robot of some sort.

I carried an old shoe box stuffed full with parts along with some solder and my soldering iron to work and over the course of my shift used the down time to cobble together the robot (or at least it's head) and mounted it to a metal case with the controls.

You can turn the head, zoom the eye inand out, record, and play back up to 20 seconds of sound. Or at least you could. A few days after I made it the little guy took a dive off a counter and was "rapidly disassembled" by the floor. I decided to put it back together, but the sound recorder doesn't work now. ohh well, something to work on another day. I'm just glad that most of it survived the fall. I also used much more hot glue to hold it together this time.

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