Design Inspiration and Research
Design Brief
I want to design a Tech Dinosaur, using the Humming Bird Due Kit, that roars when a person comes near to it. It must be based off of a T-Rex and look scary.
Sketches
Process
First I collected cardboard boxes to make my dinosaur out of, choosing only the ones which were the perfect size. Then I thought about colour and paints. I explored using spray paints however they didn't give an even covering and were very runny. Therefore, I decided to do an initial coat by hand, with poster paints and used some gold spray paint for adding a scale effect at the end.
Next I started to explore the Humming Bird Due Kit and Micro:bit adaptor. The Humming Bird has an Arduino processor and so I had to use Snap! Programming to code the jaw movement of the dinosaur (servos), roaring of the robot (speaker) and the glowing of the eyes (LEDs) -linking this to a proximity sensor. Initially, the roaring of the robot came out of the computer when connected, however this was not what I wanted. Therefore we used the Micro:bit adaptor in the Humming Bird to send a signal via radio to another Micro:bit that was connected to a speaker, telling it to play the roaring noise. We reached out to the community, via twitter, to get some help to hack the Micro:bit so that it could have a sound file on it at the same time as the Hex program. It took a lot of effort but it worked and was amazing.
The final step before putting together my dinosaur was to work out how to link all the sensors and motors to the Humming Bird, from where they would be placed in the robot. The Humming Bird was positioned in the base of the robot and I fed long wires up the dinosaurs neck, connecting to the eyes, where the LEDs and motion sensors were placed, and its jaw where the servos were. We had to ensure the board was placed with the LED connections at the front to enable the wires to reach far enough, as the LEDs were the furthest away part of the robot.
Thanks to:
My Mum -for encouraging me to keep going when it got tough and for helping me to reach out to the community.
Neil Bogie -for teaching me how to use audacity to get dinosaur roar working.
David Whale -for helping me find a way of hacking the Micro:bit with a sound file, through his insider knowledge.
The rest of the community who were 100% behind the project and kept me going.