Miss Princess Plugbot

By nmcclana
@ February 17, 2010

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

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.