First Real Look At My Ez-b Controlled Full Size Lis B9 Robot

Well today was the day! I finally got to the point in my build that I got to start installing the very cool rubber legs I bought from Will Huff onto my leg support section. Everything went well and after I completed the install I stepped back for a look to admire the sharp new fashion look of my B9. He looked pretty good except the 3 bellows above the knee plate on each leg. They were collapsed inward and ruining the look. I know what I need to do; cut some support rings out of acrylic and place them in each bellows to hold the form. Oh well, I didn't really want to finish too quick.

Here's a few pics of the process:

I'll have to remove the leg support section above the knee plate to do this. I've built this so I can easily do this.

I've removed the leg support section. Here is where then legs will tuck down into. Once I've cut out the dividing rubber where the leg section is glued to the knee section I can tuck the rubber legs down in place. As you can see there is not much room between the feet pipes and the surrounding knee plates. I'll have to trim the glued section out very close to the edge of the leg bellows.

I've made a support that will allow me to have the legs supported so I can trim safely and also have a cutting surface.

Getting ready to do the trimming. I have the support/cutting board inserted inside here.

I've marked the edge with a paint pen so I can get close without cutting through (Hopefully).

Coming along nicely a little at a time. Chunk by chunk.

DAMM! Got a little too close. Now I need to make a repair. Shouldn't be a big problem. A little silicone glue and a rubber path and it will be good as new. Just like a bike tire.

Starting the fit

All installed and ready for the leg support section to be fit in. You can see how close the feet are to the outside edge. It's going to be a tight fit.

The leg support is in place. Looks OK but I don't like the way the side of the legs squash in above the knee plates. I'll have to cut support rings out of acrylic to fit inside the leg bellows. That will keep them formed properly.

David check the email I sent to yahoo group. Some info for you there on your problem.

Will

Thanks Will for taking time out of your busy day to answer. I got your e-mail. Thanks also for the info and background.

I agree that I built the leg support unit a little too short. That's easily fixed by adding spacers.

Also great ideas about installing support rods to keep the shape and form but I like the one about filling the legs with soft foam. I'm not sure what I'll end up doing right now. I did already raise up the leg support unit 2" and the bellows straightened out. I may just keep it that way but I do like the look of the Hero Robot's squished look. However after lifting the unit 2", there is still a slight collapse of the vertical wall. Perhaps a couple interior rings will clean it up.

Thanks again, Dave

Here's a picture of the original B9's leg section. This is the look I'm going for. By lifting the leg support unit 2" I've lost this look. You can see how squished the bellows look on the TV robot.

I'm going to try to make a few retainer rings to help with the inner support of the rubber bellows and lower the unit back down.

Dave, I have been thinking about your B9 build. I have read that once its finished it will be a fixed prop and not move around, so how about it having a simple automatic mode that works in parallel with the EZ-B controllers? With such a system you could have B9 doing simple actions and sounds without having to have the PC (or laptop) connected. Let me explain how this may work. I have to date licensed 57 toy, game and gift products World-wide some selling in multi millions, but years ago when I started out to become a professional inventor, I had to get through the first few lean years when no money was coming in. It can take up to 2 years to start getting royalties from concept/inventions that I license and in the early years there were no royalties to keep me going. As I was inventing product primarily for the toy industry, I had noticed that there was only a handful of companies in Europe that could develop soundcontrollers for toys, and they charged the major toy Companies huge amounts of money. If you have a talking toy, game or gift then its almost certainly incorporates a soundcontroller! One of the biggest suppliers of soundcontrollers is Winbond in Taiwan, and I manged to go to Taiwan and get training on all their soundcontroller chips and came back to the UK with development systems so I could produce soundcontrollers for other Companies. This was great for me and got me through the lean years until the money came in from my later multiple licenses.

My favorite soundcontroller is the Winbond W523Sxx this small chip can have up to 60 seconds of quality speech/sound effects, it has 4 trigger (input) lines and 5 output lines (for motors, LEDs , relays etc), so the little chip can do quite a bit of stuff. The dev board for the W523 which is very small looks like this

So my thoughts are a W523 stand alone board connected into some of you existing B9 circuits could do some neat effects say if triggered by a nearby human (via a PIR sensor connected to one of the W523 trigger lines). I use these PIR modules on all my robots and have loads here in stock so I can send you over a few.

uk.farnell.com/panasonic-ew/amn11112/sensor-pir-compact-std-5m-white/dp/4160265

The W523 could probably have at least 20 B9 speech phrases or sound effects that could be outputted randomly of via sensor detection. Lastly the 5 outputs of the W523 would need to be parallel wired in to your BP effects units, so that the soundcontroller can at least control 5 things (lights/motors etc) on your robot.

Over the years I have developed and code released hundreds of W533xxx chips for hundreds of products, which probably equates to millions of end products sold with a soundcontroller that I developed, but I no longer need to do code releases and this has been the case for some years now.

Dave I would be prepared to do a custom soundcontroller board as seen in the jpeg above (code and add custom phrases/sound effects) for you (FOC) that could sense humans then output various B9 phrases (of your choice, all I need is the wave files), and it could also control some of your lights and movement, this would all be without the need for a computer/laptop connection. With my current workload, you would have to wait a month or so, but I would be happy to write the code and make up a board, let me know if this is of interest?

Tony

Hey Tony Those chips sound like a great idea. How much would you charge if I sent you 20 phrases from my humanoid robot to put on the chip? I am making a few robots so I will need more later also. I am upgrading a 24" B9 toy also, but I think I haft to buy the sounds first to add to him. [email protected]

@Dave The hero look may look different when the man is in the robot. I could be wrong, as I haven't even started building a full scale B9 yet. Mine will have wheelchair motor drive just to make him a little more real. Although he may weigh enough without the added drive motors. I know getting him from place to place will be a lot of work. My full scale R2D2 is very heavy and not even finished yet. He might need an EZ-B. Hmmmmmmmmmm. Your B9 is looking more hero B9 all the time. He will seem so alive to everyone, they will think a man is in there. lol Great work!

@mcsdaver , your right. The Hero robot was shorter then the stunt robot. Here's a quote from Will who made these legs; "I can recall is a conversation (with Mike Joyce, the owner of B9 Creations) we had about getting closer to the stunt robot height as opposed to the height with the actor inside the hero suit. It was very short like 13 inches and gave the squished look in the tv series. We wanted him to stand tall."

Will's mold measures 19" so there is a big difference. When I'm done I think mine will be about 16 1/2".

I've been working all evening on the support filler to keep the bellows from caving in along the bottom. It's very low teck. Like Will suggested I got some soft Styrofoam from the local art and hobby store. All I could find were sheets that were 1/2 - 3" thick so I bought a few of each. After some fitting and cutting I ended up using mostly the 1" thick sheets and stacked a few on top of each other in the center of the bottom of a leg. I then sandwiched them between two other sheets turned up on end. This put strain outwards to the sides of the lower legs and keeps the bellows from caving in. I then took them out and glued them all together with 5 minuet epoxy. Any other glue I tried to use just melted the Styrofoam. Tomorrow I'll install these low tech wonders and take a few pics of the end product. I've got a urge to glue some aluminum angle on each just to make it look more manly. cool

@Tony , I'm honored your thinking of my build and trying to come up with ways to make it better. Thanks, I'm always welcoming this type of help. Lord knows I can use all the help I can get. Your suggestion sounds like a great addition. I wish I had come across it 2 years ago. I've already spent a lot of cash and got a secondary system installed to operate independent of the EZB. I have a CF3 Sound System with a Contact IO 8 module installed. along with the 2 already onboard relays this adds eight additional switch/motion sensor inputs, and eight additional relay outputs to the CFSound III. So I can have a whole slew of sound files and motors triggered without the EZB being on. It's not cheap but it works very well. Here's a link to this product.

www.cfsound.com/index_CFSound.asp

Here it is mounted above my little amp:

And here it is looking at it from the underside when I've got the CSS opened up. It's the big green thing in the center:

Again, thanks for thinking of me. I wish I would had this offer when I started my build as the CF3 was the first thing I bought. It was how I was going to animate B9 before I found EZB. I had spent all that cash on it so I used it anyway as a secondary platform.

Dave

Dave, are you using sensors (like PIR) in your B9 stand alone mode, does it detect people etc and respond? If not those PIR sensors that I listed work really well and are small. On my robots, I use one on the left side and one on the right side and one in the center, this way body heat movement on the left, right or front areas allows directional responses from the robot. If someone approaches from the right (or left) the the robot can turn to face them and react etc. If you need these PIR's then I can put three in you package before I seal it up for delivery. Did you get the dimensions, weight details ok? the package is ready to ship.

@mcsdaver I would be happy to do you a custom souncontroller, and I would not want any money for it, just cover the postal charges. I cannot supply too many soundcontroller dev boards as they are not available to the general public and only issued to Winbond code developers and they ration them to us.

I need to know what you want the soundcontroller to do? If its just a simple one phrase after the other (sequential) every time a trigger line is clocked then its just a couple of hours work, this includes processing your wave files so they are compatible with the soundcontroller. If you want the EZ-B to be able to select any phrase then its a bit more complicated, the W523 does have a mode (called cpu mode) where it can become a slave device to an external microcontroller, but it uses an unusual "bit-bang" serial routine and may be difficult to script in ARC, I usually do the W523 comms in assembler for my applications. Let me know more about your requirements? We could start another thread on this, so we do not hijack this one.

Tony