gemmydean
Good Afternoon!
I am a proud mother of a princess warrior-she is 12 yo. She was born early at 24 weeks, weighed 25 ounces, and was 12 inches long...she had a grade III brain bleed on both sides at birth, along with many other problems/issues associated with being born early-as well as a brain tumor at 3.5 yo...all of this resulting in the many challenges she faces today. One of these challenges is having Atypical Aspergers Syndrome. Her current "micro-focus" and has been for quite a while now, is animatronics. She is obsessed with anything animatronically related, and spends hours researching how things work-which includes taking things apart/replacing parts/putting them back together-especially older vintage toys like Teddy Ruxpin, etc. She also has sensory issues and is very sensitive to sounds/pitches/tones, etc...(she is incredibly musically gifted as well). She has been infatuated with Five Nights At Freddy's and is wanting to build her own life-size animatronic robot that she wants to perform a whole gamut of things. She doesn't have a grasp or understanding of a lot of life concepts, so trying to explain to her how much time, money, supplies, etc-this would take is not going to do any good. She wanted to email your company with some questions, which I have included below; I just wanted you to know a little bit about her first. Please feel free to let me know if you have any ideas how to nurture this talent of hers as much as possible, as well as tips, websites, etc that may help explain that ie: a laboratory built a robot that took 20 yrs of money, time, staff and it took that long for them to tweak it enough to have it walk upright without falling over...even information on conventions, etc that I could bring her to, or behind the scenes tours of facilities that do this so she could be immersed in what is all involved. Thank you so much for your time and all of your help! Here is her message:
"I have a question for you, I need to buy 4 e-z v4 boards for my fnaf animatronic. I want to buy 4 of them so it can say over a thousand things! but first, it says on the video that "verbal error messages will be played through the high quality speaker." "i have successfully connected to the internet" "my battery is low". I want to know how to disable or turn off all those sayings that were all programmed on the thing and I also want you to show me how to turn off the start up and turn off chime. I'm pretty sure that you can turn it off because I saw a video of someone who built a life size lost in space robot on youtube. he used 2 of these ezb v4 boards and a sparkfun mp3 trigger. I did not even hear the startup chime or any of the error messages at all! and he did not use the power shell! so, does this mean that you can turn all those sounds off without using the power shell? please let me know. I have not bought any ezb v4 boards yet. were trying to save our money to buy them."
Thanks again! Somer McFarland (843) 287-4631
Hi - It is highly recommended to not disable the chimes as they are necessary for operation to know connection/disconnection and battery messages. You can disable the battery monitor or modify the low voltage warning in the settings, however that depends on the type of battery you are using. It is highly highly highly recommended that you do not disable the battery monitor. Battery monitor will notify you of a low battery - and using it will save $cost$ on buying new batteries by not letting the battery discharge further than recommended values.
Removing functionality that makes the ez-b v4 stand out from the rest will cause usability and reliability issues.
"Laboratory robots" is an expression that could be have been used in the mid 2000's before technology like ez-robot was consumer available and easy to use. Before EZ-Robot, there were only components that must be pieced together with electronic knowledge and requiring high level of microcontroller hardware programming.
In this day of age, the technology that is used in "laboratory robots" is mostly software, which is widely available - and even more available and easy to use due to ez-robot. Having robots balance or walk or anything is easy with ez-robot, as you can see in the product videos on this website.
Additionally, the more in-depth you get with ez-robot, begin coding algorithms or working with others to enhance existing functions.
Lastly, "animatronic" is pre-programmed animations that execute in a loop. While that is the most simplistic usage of ez-robot, it's still fun. However, it doesn't take much additional effort to add interactive animations and behaviors using the camera, speech or other controls.
have fun!