Disneyland Droid breakdown + analysis
Alright. Went to Disneyland for the GFs birthday last week, and had to grab one of these guys for research purposes. It's a really neat toy at $99, it's already giving me lots of solutions to problems I haven't hit yet, but there are a few aspects I want to improve on for Arbo.
Dome head is attached via magnets to the core body, and uses plastic sliders to reduce friction. There are a couple of LED lights in the head, and each of these sliders has a small wireless charging pad built into them for power transfer from the core body. There are no batteries in the head.
The shell of the core body is a super simple twist mechanism to assemble/disassemble. Will absolutely be stealing this.
Droid Depot called this part the "motivator" which I think is cute. The grey stalk at the top contains magnets and wireless coils for power transfer to the head, which has a small spring to ensure the motors have friction on the inside of the shell. Something I did not consider, which will likely also be stolen. The head stalk does not rotate on the body like the movie prop does as shown a few posts above, the entire unit rotates inside the shell along with the head. This does not allow the robot to strafe, the head is always facing the direction of movement.
There are caster wheels at the front and rear of the head stalk and core motivator. Two soft rubber wheels on the bottom either rotate the motivator inside the shell or move forward/backwards. Taking note of using soft rubber for traction on the interior of the shell. 6 AA batteries are on the bottom of the motivator, and the battery door is weighted to keep the robot upright.
Weights in grams
My nights are haunted by this little thing
It does make sounds with the lights which are absolutely painfully spot on perfect and I will need to find and steal.
It's very wobbly in action. The weight at the bottom turns the whole thing into a pendulum, which is something I'd like to address with a gyroscope and finer control over the motor speed. The controller has 6 inputs, forward, back, left, right, light, and sound. There seems to be no effort made to controlling the speed of the motors with software, and the ramp-up or ramp-down is just inertia. The motors are simply forward, reverse or off. Because of this, you can't move forward and turn at the same time, because turning requires one motor to be moving backwards. I'm curious if the robot could move in an arc if both motors spun forward at different speeds.
May 31, 2024
I’m uploading and storing the FreeRTOS documentation for my own personal use here.
June 1, 2024
Disassembled the toy's core motivator, I see no reason I can't interface with every module using my own chip and code in the same way I'm doing with the RC car. Starting at the brown top left connector moving clockwise, the connectors in the 2nd picture are:
Board containing power switch, BT pair button
RF chip
Speaker
Wireless charging pads
Board containing power switch, BT pair button
Battery pack
Motor
Motor
June 3, 2024
We are learning to solder PCBs baby
June 8, 2024
Fucked up and bought a PWM servo driver, what I needed was a DC motor driver with PWM capability. Ordered, should arrive Monday. Now confident in my soldering abilities, so not a total loss.
Spent this week working on code to improve the stability of the toy we dissected last week, using the BNO085 and PID control, I can do a bit of code review for that if there's interest, I think it's super interesting. I'm starting to move towards using the toy as a proof of concept/ platform for development from now on and ditching the RC car. Will have to see what roadblocks come up once the new motor drivers come in and what the priorities of the project are.
Looking at more design inspo. Samsung's initial design of Ballie used two vertically oriented hemispheres and a stationary central vertical band.
