PORTAL 2 - Animatronic Wheatley Replica - 07.04. - Face mechanics finished!!
Hey everyone
Sorry for the silent last months but I haven’t really had any time to continue with Wheatley the way I had hoped I could. Unfortunately my motivation sitting in front of 123D design and work on the model was quite low so yeah… that’s how life goes!
But now all my energy kicked back in and I’m proud to present you Wheatleys face in it’s full glory. It’s just a screenshot from 123D though so no 3D printing has been happening so far apart from smaller bits and pieces I finished off.
Wheatleys face was BY FAR the hardest thing I have ever come across to design considering I had to make sure to replicate all his expressions as accurate as possible. If you’re looking at it now you should see all the mechanics I managed to stuff in there.
It’s quite simple you might say but I had quite the headache to design those and stuff them in there as there is not much space to work with. So a few movements are limited due to a lack of exactly this space.
However I reached all my goals I set myself to implement and I’m really proud of myself
Here are a few pictures for you to look at. It maybe not all makes sense but I’m onto making a video explaining all the details
apologies for now!!
So let’s start…
This is the base of Wheatley’s face. Bear in mind those parts aren’t finished completely as I’m currently planning the mounting mechanics for all the bolts, servos and electronics to keep it all together safely
The black parts on the image below are the mounts to attach Wheatley’s face to the rails running inside the sphere. Those are going to be mounted via M4 and M5 bolts.
One of the hardest tasks was how to do cable management.
As Wheatley’s “heart” (Arduino) will rest in his back I needed to figure out a way to guide all the cables inside his eye to the back. I’ll be using four of the six pistons which are running from his eye to the backside – exactly what I needed !
Those pistons are mounted using ball joints to move around as the eye moves too. For this purpose I had to design the sockets for the joints (transparent/silver in the images)
After a little modification I had them hollowed out and a tunnel was made running inside the eye itself connecting all the different parts where servos, leds and cables will be.
It’s quite hard to understand but hopefully the pictures help.
Mad paint skillz should represent the cables
The next thing are the eye lids.
One servo at the top and one at the bottom are each pulling on a string the lids are attached to. If the servos let go, some weights inside the lids will pull them back down to the ground.
And as the servos are rather quickly and gravity is too some serious fast movement is guaranteed
Apart from the movement of the pupil which is basically mounted on centered ball joint and pushed/pulled by two servos (next update) one of the main movements I implemented is to turn the front ring of the eye.
You can see the purple part which is hinged on a grey and green lever. The green one is attached to a servo sitting in there. If the servo turns the purple part is moved up (or down). Since this part is mounted on Wheatley’s front face this gives me the freedom to turn it in every direction for around 35°. Not much, but it’s there
As said I will try to come up with a little video to show you guys all the mechanics in action but you will have to bear with pictures for now
However… THANKS FOR CHECKING OUT! Feel free to ask questions if you have any. Happy to answer!
Cheers!
Mario
