TVC15

I came up with the idea for this project a few years ago. The inspiration came from a song from the album "Station to Station"by the late, great David Bowie.It tells the story of a television that devours the narrator's girlfriend. The seed of the idea for the song apparent;y stemmed from Iggy Pop believing his girlfriend was eaten by Bowie's television during a drug induced hallucination. It's one of my favorite anecdotes about a song, and I thought it was a great name for a robot. I sort of put the idea on the back burner(as I usually have to. Ideas come so fast and furious at me, sometimes I really can't keep up with what I actually should be working on.). In the meantime, I gathered odds and ends for a good year, before deciding to set to just before New years.

On the 10th of January, David Bowie of course, passed away. It hit me personally a lot harder than I probably had a right for it to, and quite honestly I still feel a profound loss. The transcendent music he created accompanied me on many long nights of difficult work. It helped me push myself out of my comfort zone as an artist, and it made it all the more important for me to finish the piece.

Now, on to some of the tech stuff:
TVC15 is almost completely 3D printed in PLA with several coatings of  Smooth on's 

XTC 3D, which helps with and brittleness issues you can run into with FDM consumer grade printers and mechanical parts. It was modeled primarily in AutoDesk Inventor, although I figured out a way to export the CAD data into Zbrush and modeled the hands that were actually printed(not shown in 

the quick renderings posted here, but you can see them in the pics and video). I used an Arduino Mega 2560 for the Brain, and 16X32 LED matrix for the face. It has a  Pixy CMU Cam for color recognition, and a sharp IR sensor for distance. If the Pixy sees a shape with a certain amount of pinkish colored blocks, the head will seek it out, and if it doesn't get distracted, will follow the movement of the object throughout the room.If you get to close to  the robot, It will raise its arms.

As for the muscle, the TVC15 uses 6 Tower Pro MG995R High torque metal gear servos for the neck and arms, 3 Tower pro SG90s for the wrist and hands along with an adafruit custom analog feed back servo in the left thumb for future experiments. It's powered via a 9 volt plug in adapter for the arduino, and a 5 volt, 10 amp ac Adapter for the heavy load stuff, like the servos and LED matrix.
......You know what else it has? A kajillion wires.Exactly one kajillion. I need to come up with a better harness system (or any harness system for that matter)in the near future.

 

Now watch this terrible video.I will be posting more with better quality as time allows me to, but this will have to do in the meantime. 

I wanted to create the TVC15 as a test bed for other robotic/interactive  projects in the future. The torso is hollow to make room for additional boards and sensors as I go. As far as the inevitable "why?" that tends to rear it's ugly head when I do things like this, the motivation is really simple.I love machines. I love movement and interacting with something vastly alien to me. I often find myself running towards things I don't understands, and I think it's because its a formula for exponential growth.

This project feels like a portfolio worth of learning in itself, and I don't think it will ever be truly finished.I'm hoping to release the specs in the near future so hopefully others will take an interest and build from it.I would love to be at least partially responsible for an army of unique interactive machines.
 


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