Terror Ted already looked like he was ready to hurt you while you slept, but for some reason, we decided that wasn’t enough. Built as part of two Halloween projects we undertook in 2021, he looks obviously terrifying.
We wanted him to look like something you’d see out of a dystopian sci-fi franchise/horror film. We took a lot of inspiration from The Borg in Star Trek, and multiple horror films that use inanimate teddies and dolls to terrorise people throughout their productions.
Previously, we had cut a huge hole in his right leg, and put an aluminium droplink inside to look like a bone (from a BMW car), cut his other leg off completely and gave him a new one made out of worn down meccano, cut out his stomach to put more metal inside, cut out his left eye and replaced it with a hammered metal plate with a red LED mounted in it, sewed a jigsaw blade to his right arm (power tool), a plastic chain to his left arm, and a bunch of green LED’s lighting up his insides.
He looked great for Halloween, but he wasn’t very happy with us.
From the beginning though, we wanted him to be able to sense when someone was close to him, so he could express his displeasure and talk on his own. The idea was that we would use an amplifier and speaker, via an Arduino Nano and activated by a PIR sensor (Passive Infra Red),to load a bunch sounds into an SD card (that would go into an SD card player compatible with Arduino) and he’d cycle through them at random whe he sensed someone close.
We encountered many problems with the build however, and by the end of it, we were certain that our PIR sensor was also broken. We then became doubtful that the sensor was correct for what we were trying to do. So we turned to a spare Infrared Obstacle Sensor Module we had in our spares, and after a lot more fiddling with wires and code, we managed to get it to work.
So far we’ve only been able to get it to work with one sound but when we have some more time (and patience), we still want it to be able to cycle through sounds randomly.
We cut another large hole in his back, and using string, we secured in into place (it looked more ‘rag doll’). He has a rather large hole in his bottom where a speaker horn now sits (Monacor MPT 005), also tied into place using string. We can sit him down easier now, but he can surprisingly still stand up. After giving them a small covering of hot glue (to protect them from the stuffing that is in him, and to prevent wires coming loose), we put the Arduino, and SD card module into his stomach. If you look closely, you can see their blinking lights glow behind his fur.
We fastened the Infrared sensor to the side of his head, just right of his right eye. If he didn’t already look terrifying, he certainly looks menacing now. He still isn’t very happy with us.
You can find out more about Terror Ted on his own page here: Terror Ted
Cerys
#RoboticsIsForEveryone
