Project - K-9 robot

Hello all , been lurking here and Im ready to start talking about my project.

I am building a replica of the k-9 robot from the BBC show Doctor Who

I have been wanting to do this for a long time - like almost 20 years!

I have started building the body , consisting of an internal skeleton of aluminum supports and a thin aluminum skin covered by carbon fiber.

electronics wise I plan on drawing from the experience here with your wonderful advise and some of the mod guides here have inspired me to put my own spin on the doggie. (Mashie,Vonkaar and G-nome have inspired me among many others you rock! also Specialak and the animus have been really cool with advise on pics and such thanks a lot!!!)


My version of k-9 is going to be carbon fiber because I like it !!!

also the lights on my dog will consist of pic controlled rgb leds so it can light up any way desired.

proscessor power will be provided by some kind of mini itx motherboard and Im considering power from a bank of lithium ion batteries , a sealed acid battery or something else I have not considered.

Progress so far.

I have started building the metal endoskeleton ( lol kinda terminator looking right now) and some of the sub skin.

I know its not all that original but I have wanted one of these for a long long time.

pics to follow very soon

scaranhybrid

 

I certainly hope its going to move around and talk. It just wouldn't be K-9 if it didn't

Sounds cool...i'll be watching

 

one word answer:

Affirmative!!

heres some drawings I made in paintshop:



and a pic of my cardboard reference model i made to get the dimensions in 3d (and no im not using stitches in my scarf to measure it )



another picture:



ill be putting up pics of the construction and start my log this weekend

scaranhybrid

 

That's an awesome Idea. Will be following this thread, good luck!

 

cool, will be watching this one!

 

Even the cardboard mockup looks good!

It's the..


(wait for it)..




dogs kahoona's!

 

Whoa, looks great. You could possibly even mold the carbon fibre body straight away using the cardboard mockup as a mold, saving the time and effort spent on an aluminium skin. If you need more strength you could use fibreglass or thin aluminium mesh (auto repair shop) and plastic resin as a base and then add the carbon fibre on top of that.

This will be interesting to follow

 

if that's gonna be a pc then what next? maybe we'll mod pcs into guns or what ?

good idea looks kewl gonna be watchin this

 

Have you worked with carbonfiber before?
Its kinda expensive.

 

But E-Glass and Resin isn't that bad.

Very cool, can't wait to see more of this one!!

 

I know carbon fiber is expensive if you buy it already molded in panels , Im going to be doing that on the flat surfaces and epoxying the edges together after they are bolted in place. This will give the greatest strength to weight ratio I have been able to find , for the curved and or non weight bearing parts ( the head and the top of the back) I plan on molding the parts myself.

Thanks very much for the suggestion and the compliment! I think Im going to stick with the carbon fiber but am checking into eglass and the resin

I had thought of that , the cardboard body is very flimsy, I had also thought about using foamcore or some kind of plastic sheet. Originally I was going to make the whole dog out of aluminum like a li-lian case for heat disipation purposes. I decided against this because I discovered that the aluminum heat disipation effect in some situations would work against me ( like if the robot found itself in a hot environment ) I saw Mashie's y2k bug and was quite inspired to change my plans. I did buy some thin aluminum that I was going to use as a template to cut larger thicker sheets of aluminum that i could use as a base mold also I can polish aluminum very smooth and use it to disapate proscessor heat to a point and the carbon fiber will absorb the heat. also most computers have a thin sheet of aluminum to reduce Electro Magnetic Interference . I have the bones as you will see below



I would like to thank all of you for your positive comments and suggestions , espescially about my cardboard mockup, although some of the dimensions were a bit off. ( head is a bit wider than it needs to be ) so here I start my worklog:


First I started with buying a dremel and a bunch of clamps a drill and some sheet aluminum and some aluminum bars , I started cutting curved rib pieces:




to support the top of the back . I basically built a ribcage that consists of rows of aluminum bars with a curved top , shishkabobed on 4 steel bolts and held in place with about 50 nuts like so:




from here I made 2 angle pieces , and had needed to shorten the bolts slightly so the angle pieces made a 70 degree angle with the floor from the top just like my drawing , I measured and carefully took a square aluminum tube cut the bottom out of it and carefully clamped and bent the outer edge to 70 degrees from 90 degrees , and took 2 angled aluminum bars about 4 feet in length and bent them with corresponding angles , and I cut some wider angled aluminum to make the corners of the body for the last foot or so of the corners near the floor. from here I did a test fit clamping the pieces together with c clamps and some vicegrips ( vice grips are the most useful tool in the known universe this side of the sonic screwdriver!!!! you can use them to bend stuff , grip stuff , break the hold of pesky frozen bolts and screws and extend the strength of your grip to an order of magnitude giving you a god like hold on almost anything) ( MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!)
ok I got sidetracked , the test fit picture please !!




Ok there are several screws and support bars that need to be added here and on the top of the back some of the ribs need to be cut and bent at 2 90 degree angles to facilitate the fitting of the keypad from the underside. The hole this will create an area where a slot loading dvd will go allowing you to slide dvdrw disks into the front of the keypad, and there will be a hard drive cage below that and my prescious ( MY PRESCIOUS!!!!!) mini itx board on a carbon fiber mount.

that is the current state of the body , the head has been started on as well ,

what I did when I noticed that the head was slightly wider than I wanted it to be ( after jumping up and down and uttering a few magic colorful motivational words) was to take 2 sheets of thin aluminum I blew up the picture above I made in photoshop, sitting down with a protractor and a ruler and pencil I measured and angled a 1:1 scale of the side of the head. to measure the head suports underneath ( they are not just 90 degree angles, there are curves and some obtuse angles.) I planned and am still working on a way to bolt it together prior to attaching the sides , top bottom , the nose and back of the head, The head will have 2 doors , the top of the head will open from back to front in a hinge like fashion ( after being unscrewed) and the top of the muzzle will open too in a similar fashion from front to back so I can add / modify the voicebox and the Laser.... yes I did say laser
pictures of the head being worked on :




please note the polished shine I put on this head panel, "why?" you ask being that this side is going to be on the inside? for the voice box, Im not simply adding a speaker but a mechanism called a sound bug from ( http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/mp3/5a15/ ) that will in essence make the entire head a speaker. It attaches via a suction cup which I will probably use some substance to permanently attach inside. the inputs to the sound bug will run back down the spine to the mini itx boards speaker outputs. I have found a cool speech synthesiser program that models individual voices based on recordings , this software is commonly used in IVRU systems when you call to pay your bills . I know I want the voice to not be the same as k-9 but be a bit more like robocop 2... " Drop your weapon, you have 10 seconds to comply..." drops weapon ...." you have 3 seconds to comply..2..1."" another voice I really like is smith from The Matrix that may actually end up being the dog's default voice.




Ok im working on the body and the head thats about all I have in pictures for now , well almost I have been thinking about how the neck will articulate the head through the vertical and horizontal plane and not break a bunch of cables that will be running through it . I made a spinal cord for the dog and here it is:




it is a plastic corrugated tube, rubber sink grommetts have been stretched over it to act as stops for vertabrae to which cables will be attached to servo motors controlled via pwm. what are the vertebrae? , interesting story attached to that . .. several years ago I worked at a used computer store and trash day came ,, there was no business and we were bored .. very bored so bored as we had ran out of hard drives to format and every computer in the place had scandisk and defraged and virus scanned .. there was nothing at all to do and it was a nice day outside. The trash guy that disposes of stuff we cant throw in the dumpster ( because of heavy metals and such ) was late and we had loads of dead hard drives in the back taking up space , ones with irrecoverable bad sectors broken logic boards or had other terminal problems. boring ,,,, nope we grabbed our aluminum baseball bat ( aka the collections department ( DONT ASK!!)) went out back and played a game of hard drive baseball!!!! this is just what it sounds like......and here is the results of a home run :



there were loads of dead 20 mb, 10 mb ide and mfm hard drives that needed to find a home and the guy that was supposed to dispose of them never showed so I asked the owner ( presciently knowing I would need them someday ) if I could take about 20-30 of them. He was more than happy to get rid of them . basically the platter are in tact, and once removed from the spindle they fit snugly over the spine and are firmly held in place by the sink grommetts. I will be drilling 4 holes on each disk in a cross formation and then running cables through the tube and like I said pwm an attached servo motor in the body that will allow my robot to look up ( straight up if desired) and unlike its BBC counterpart , left and right.

Thats all I have for this update hopefully Ill get the body and the head together in the next few weeks and I should have a small update about the keypad and eye panel ( ooo blinking lights droool .... ) shortly. I am aiming to do carbon fiber work in july . I will be updating more often than that


as allways .. comments welcome

Excelsior!

scaranhybrid

 

wow, sounds pretty cool.

 

Wow, if you pull this off it should be awsome, to you

 

wow, if it turns out like the drawings it should be very impressive

 

Looks good man ill be watching this one

 

still sounds good

question: what will the k-9's surface look like? brushed alu or what ? (haven't seen the dctor who series but i1ve played it's pinball )

 

Good question ,

The K-9 in the doctor who series was kind of a gun metal grey color. I have seen cartoons and comicbooks where he is drawn to look like highly polished aluminum. I have an inside track to some people who have seen the original prop and it is made of fiberglass and is a dull plastic grey , now having worked in theather and with cameras and lighting and having seen many hours of doctor who I gather that a shiny brushed aluminum dog would have been a pain in the butt to film. espescially for doctor who where they had a habit of switching back and forth between videotape and film depending on lighting conditions/ indoors and outdoors. Many times when this is the case in film and tv something is colored such that it will look metalic on screen depending on how it is lit.

I plan on the dark carbon fiber look for my k-9 so it will not look like the one from the tv show . lemme get my camera phone fired up and Ill show you a sample of what im going for here......( time elapse)

ok here we are this is what the surface of my K-9 will look like :


and Ill find a link of k-9 from the doctor who series for you and link to it :

http://www.shillpages.com/dw/k902.jpg

I dont know , if I dont like what the carbon fiber ends up looking like I might paint it silver or I may paint it gloss black or flat black depending on the result.

I think I will like the carbon fiber look and I plan on trim that is polished and clearcoated aluminum ( the ears, the mounting hardware around the eye panel, the laser, possibly the tail and eye probe suction cup , definitely the nameplate on the side)

When I decided carbon fiber would be a good material I kind of though no I dont want to do it , but then I figured this way , , its kind of like r2d2 in starwars , there was r2d2 who was an r2 unit of which there were several different kinds that came in different colors and types, in one scene if you look closely on the death star in episode 4 there is an imperial r2 unit and it is black trimmed with silver and white and it looked more menacing than r2d2 just because of its coloration otherwise it was the same prop.


scaranhybrid

 

Im sorry man, this sounds TOO F__king awesome!!!1 Mod on!!1

 

one other thing , just to set the tone and give you an idea of the type of k-9 im building , if youve ever the seen farscape tv series on the Sci Fi channel, think of mine as the peacekeeper comando version of k-9.

notice the collar in the link above? its plaid and then compare it to mine that I got for my dog




oh well im back to work

 

I have never seen this show but it looks like it could be a sweet mod... i screwed up an old laptop hdd (15 gigs ) so i took off the front cover and it makes a nice desktop toy / mirror to see who is comming up behind me