Maxwell the Talking Robot at Portland's Dorkbot Monday

November 30, 2008

Every two weeks we have a meeting in Portland called "Dorkbot". The tagline is "People Doing Strange Things with Electricity". A lot of people stop by and bring awesome things that they're working on.

At first sight (and since I looked at it from the back), what I saw was a jumble of electronic parts and circuit boards. This made me very happy, of course, as Dorkbot members always have a great time telling others what something they've worked on, as well as exactaly how they made it work.

Upon closer inspection, the circuitboards and wires turned out to be a robot named Maxwell.

About Maxwell

"Maxwell is an animatronic" says Mark Medonis, Inventor, "in that five hobby servos are used to move a puppet head. Two servo are used to move the eyes left/right and up/down, and two servos are used to move the entire head left/right and up/down. The fifth servo opens and closes the jaw".

"A BASIC Stamp II is used to read the positions of two joysticks and convert those positions to commands sent to a Mini SSC II servo control circuit from Scott Edwards Electronics. The two joysticks control eye and head motion".

Here is Mark Medonis with Maxwell, smiling widely. He was a very interesting and informative guy to talk to. We learned from Maxwell's Creator that he'd been working on his robot for the last 11 years. To which friend and Hacker Anselm said, "My son is only 8 years old! Your robot is older than my son!"

This is the Maxwell control interface. I had him recite "The Raven" so see how he'd pull off the rhymes. Not bad! "However, the important advance in Maxwell that makes it more robotic than animatronic is the speech system". All one had to do is type some words into the keyboard and it would speak them.

"A Visual Basic program performs both speech synthesis as well as lip sync movement of the jaw on the robot. Both of these happen in real time, so any arbitrary dialogue can be commanded". Basically, the entire thing was pretty impressive, considering that it had been created by a single person.

Mark Medonis has a page on Maxwell here, as well as instructions on creating your own robot head at Medonis Engineering. Medonis is a proud member of the Portland Area Robotics Society. Tomorrow I'll be going to a workshop hosted by DorkbotPDX called "Making Noise with the Arduino" at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Tune in for some interesting coverage!

Mark just registered for CyborgCamp, a Portland event on the future of humans and technology. We'll be seeing more of Maxwell soon.

There are Dorkbots all over the world. If you're interested in messing around with electricity, circuitboards, and other materials with a group of amazing an inspired people check out the Dorkbot.org site. It has a map of all of the dorkbots in existence. So whether you're in san francisco (sf) . linz . melbourne . seattle (sea) . rotterdam . lisbon . sofia . chicago (chi) . southern california (socal) .
switzerland (swiss) . orlando . madrid . detroit . ciudad de méxico (cdmexico) . philadelphia
medellín (mde) . toronto . berlin (bln) . eindhoven . tijuana (frontera) . rio de janeiro ... you can find a dorkbot near you.

Can't find one? Well, you can start a dorkbot in your city.

And if you have pictures, please send a link to them in the comments.