WalleModding


		Pimping my toy Wall-e.

I won an "Interaction Wall-e" on an online auction. I really enjoyed it, and I wanted to take it to work. There were several problems with this, though. For instance, the toy is very loud, annoying my fellow co-workers. This led me to start thinking of mods I could do so I could still enjoy it. My initial thoughts were I would simply disable the speaker (something I could do in a matter of a minute or two.) Of course, as all fans of electronics and "Circuit Bending" know, it is really hard to look at a toy like this and not go a little nuts. And that's what I did...

	This is the circuit board. I have marked the various connectors. (Click on image to enlarge)
This is the other side of the circuit board. It comes screwed down.

	Here you can see my first hack. I cut one of the speaker wires and added a 1k potentiometer between the 2 cut ends. I had a seperate knob for sticking out the side of Wall-e.
The second hack was adding a switch for turning Wall-e's motors on and off. They are kind of loud. I cut one of the main wires coming from the motor connectors and attached a small slide switch.

	Another thing that bothered me was that Wall-e only ran on batteries :( So I decided to add a power supply, allowing him to run off batteries or wall power. :) I simply ran positive and negative to the PCB (to Gnd and Vdd).
I used a 4.5v (adjustable) power supply from Radio Shack that I had laying around. It provides up to 250mA which was enough power (I was sort of surprised, considering the size of the motor!)

	I then drilled 2 holes on Wall-e's side to allow access to the volume control and the motor switch, which I glued in.
That's when I decided to really start getting serious. Looking at Wall-e's front, there is a lot of room for improvement.

	I had been doing a lot with LED matrixes so I decided to incorporate one. I got a couple really small ones from Digi-Key which happened to fit really well right into the front grate of Wall-e :)
It just so happened that this matrix fit perfectly into the grate on Walle's front.

	I hooked one of the Matrix up to a PIC 16f677 microcontroller and decided to have some fun with animations...
I cut a space for the LED matrix where the grate was. I had to remove the button on top as the matrix was blocked by it. I figured I would have to shave this button down and glue it in. Oh well, the first victim.

oops, still working... Will be done with Wall-e soon. Check back later.

Pimping my toy Wall-e.