Bubby the Robot

After reading a local news story about a robot that was stolen from someone's yard and the robot belong to a young child and then learning the robot had been returned I decided to contact the owner and see if they would like some help restoring their robot. 

He's name is Bubby (like brother) and is a Safety Sam model remote controlled robot originally built by Robotronics, Inc. in 1986.  Many parts of the robot were missing or damaged including the remote control.  The remote control alone would cost around $800 to preplace.  The original remote control, as good as it was, was not designed to be operated by a child, which is the intended controller.

After careful consideration in the design and costs of the restoration of the robot (sense I was contributing the parts and my time for no cost to the family) I decided to purchase a wireless relay control board and remote from a DinoDirect.  In my design I would use with to send signals to a Basic Stamp II that would then activate different subroutines in it's program based on the remote input.

The Remote control worked great!!  The basic stamp II read the signals perfectly on a muliti-input line with a series of resistors.  Unfortuniatly many of the Robotronic PWM motor control boards did not work correct, in fact only one did so I ended up wiring many of the DC motor directly to the relay board.

I planed to add a voice to Bubby via an emic text-to-speech board, but due to a bad voltage regulator, I fired the voice boards I was going to use.  So I programmed a function for Bubby to move his mouth and the owners can use a walkie-talkie to create speech for Bubby.  This is not much different then the original design for the voice system which used a wireless FM mic.

If you have any questions for me on this project you can e-mail me at weyoun7ster@gmail.com