Andy Roid
Hello to All
My little one is doing well. I have gotten busy working and ran out of hands on time, so the project has slowed down, Soon I will try my hand at writing scripts for her. (New dress soon.)
My new question is I have a latex minion doll which is about 8" (200 mm for you Canadian Guys) ( lol ). I had installed 2 mini servos in the head for eye movement, blinking and activating a switch to drive a built in sound board and speaker. I plan on adding one more servo for body movement. (Was R/C controlled). Not much room left for the ezb and battery.
Any suggestions on how to remove the case from the ezb and connect the speaker power etc without destroying the ezb.
I may have to go another route if I will destroy the precious ezb. (ezb to drive a Wireless Adruino Slave ?)
Maybe someday DJ will build a mini ezb with less IO ? for projects like this. (Entry level)
Thanks,
Ron
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If you want to remove and use the EZ-B out of the casing you will need to do a little bit of soldering, but not much.
Once you have removed the screws and removed the casing, for the speaker you will need to solder a couple of wires to the amplified SPK solder points or the non amplified points of the lower part of the PCB. You might want to take a look at the very well written sound breakout mod that Dave Schulpius wrote as it describes how he did this. You can solder the other ends of the wires to the EZ-B speaker removed from the lower casing, or use another speaker.
Non amplified way
Amplified way
As for the power input there are a couple of options. For one, you could solder a couple of wires to the power input solder ports on the lower part of the EZ-B, and a connector on the other end of the wires to connect to the battery. The second option is to get yourself a mini Deans connector (I think that's correct) that will plug in to the power pins on the bottom of the EZ-B.
I hope some of that helps Ron, and I look forward to seeing your progress with the minion doll . They crack me up.
I hope I can get all the stuff inside. If not maybe an interface between the ezb and the minion.
I will pull the boards out of the case to see if it will fit and once I get my new stuff from the shop with a new ezb, I will start soldering.
Ron
No problem. Truth be told, with the EZ-B out of its protective casing (without the power shell) you won't save very much space compaired to it being in the casing. But the PCB's are easy to remove so it'll be easy to check. Let us know how you get on.
Thanks for the info..
You are right on how little space is really saved.
Any other ideas on how to get a lot of stuff into a little space?
I am still wanting a remote ezb with communications. I will then be able to also run more than one robot from 1 ezb with better interaction.
The robots are small. (Minions from the movie). The ezb in a case, and 1 servo with mechanics fills the body cavity, no room for battery.
I need 3 servos, a speaker, battery plus the communication unit.
I am running the minion now with an r/c receiver and all the above stuff plus a very small soundboard now with little room left. I sill want the ezb power.
Soon I may open a new thread to see if anyone has done a remote ezb like I need.
Any thoughts?
Ron
You maybe should consider an Arduino Micro, Mini or Nano.... If I understand what you want to do correctly, there would be no point in using an ezb unless it is on board the robot itself....
I do mean a wireless communication from the ezb to the robot.
I have limited needs in the robot. (3 servos, and a sound system (mic and speaker which can be a separate unit). The speech processing power and servo operation from the ezb is what I need to run, but no room.
The almost 30 I/O, camera, UART ports and built in speaker are great for my larger bot, but way too large for my minions. A 90 percent loss in functionality still gives me more than enough for this project.
Any thoughts on a wireless communication to do the job?
Ron
By the way... We have had discussions some while back about an ezb mini... DJ has confirmed that the current ezb is as small as it gets, there will no other ezb4 models... Maybe the ezb5 (if there ever is one) might be reduced in size, who knows...
The processing power of the ezb gives me everything I need. The interface ability between the voice and servos is key. With the EZB Software, it is easy to develop what I want to do. The robots I have are small and I understand your concerns, and appreciate you ideas. I will put these discussions and thoughts for a communication system aside for now, but I won't give up.
I will continue to develop the concept and develop the software. I will put it in a larger robot platform or maybe just a head like the one on my little girl above, for testing and see how it works out.
Thank you for getting back to me.
Ron
If you build a small stand with the EZ-B inside and the Minion on top you will have the room in the robot for the servos and speaker and the EZ-B and battery can be in the stand.
Hope this works for you.
Thanks for the idea. The stand will help with the developing of the minion robot.
Ron
I have one of those Minions also.
He might need an EZ-B.
Hmmmmmmmmm
EZ-B can make a cool backpack on a Minion also.
Thanks
Ron
The minion attached to the base would keep him from falling over also.
Plus servos could make him dance!