Building a Portal Turret with motion controlled audio and lighting

Step 9 Electronics

Now here is the fun part of the project! Essentially bringing the turret to life. There are a few main elements that I wanted to incorporate into the final turret.  First being the red LEDs for the eye. Simple enough. Second is a series of audio clips controlled by a motion sensor. Third, the ability to play the original Portal theme song.

For those interested I am choosing to leave out the functionality of playing the audio clips when the turret is picked up, as well as the related audio clips when the turret is knocked over. The reason is pretty simple. This guy is not being built to take the abuse of constant handling or being knocked over all the time. While the individual parts of the turret are fairly strong, the assembled turret will be somewhat fragile on those very thin spindly legs. For weight reasons I am also leaving out the ability for the arms to move around like they do in the game. All of the extra engineering required with components and servos would likely add a good bit of weight to the turret. It would be cool, but I'm going to stick with a static model. Same with functioning guns... it all comes back to the weight.

Alright! After hours doing research on Mouser and Sparkfun researching components, and much experimentation, This is the list of parks that I settled on. The main components include an arduino uno, mp3 trigger, power regulation board and an epir motion sensor. There are various other smaller components like switches, buttons, LEDs, resistors, the speaker, battery packs and wall jacks. At the bottom of this page are two links to places you can pick up all the materials I used.

The programming was all done in the Arduino environment. Since I would classify myself as a beginning programmer, there were portions of the code that I needed some serious help with.  I was able to get the basic functions working but needed help with some of the more complicated stuff.  I called on a work buddy of mine, Pedram Javidpour: professional scripter extraordinaire, to help me get this program up and running. I couldn't have finished it without his help!  The finished program is attached at the bottom of this page as well for you to look at, dissect, and/or use if you decided to build a turret..

After the program was finished I was ready to start installing all of the electronics into the turret. I decided to split up the components between the arm and the main body cavity. The arm would get the battery pack, wall jack, power selector, motion sensor, main power switch, and the button to play the theme song. There are images of it all installed below.

So electronics in the arm cover power and small components. The main guts of this guy are located within the body cavity. In the picture below you can see the arduino on the right side, the mp3 trigger on the bottom, and the speaker on the left. The cluster of wire at the top link up to the eye. These components were all just glued in place with standoffs.

Installing all of this stuff was definitely tricky.  The most important part is just to make sure that you connect up the right wires to the right places and test each component as you go.  It will not be fun it you get everything cleanly installed and it doesn't turn on.  You will then spend many hours trying to troubleshot where the problem is.



Materials used in this stage
http://www.mouser.com:80/ProjectManager/ProjectDetail.aspx?AccessID=63305edc4b
http://sprkfn.com/w3635
gorilla glue

Tools used in this stage
Soldering iron
wire strippers
heat gun
shrink tubing
pliers
multimeter