Building a Voight-Kampff Machine

BillytheBrick

BillytheBrick

New Member
I was recently commissioned by a local museum, the Living Computer Museum, to build them several Voight-Kampff machines for their "Do Androids Dream of Living Computers?" event coming up this weekend to celebrate both the original Blade Runner and the release of the new film. I've finished the build, with the exception of one of their employees doing up some of the final electronics (he's the one that reached out to me initially to do the prop build). These machines will be part of immersive experience and so, while most of the lights and screens will be illuminated by plain LEDs, the camera and screen will actually be functional with one of the buttons actually being functional to take a photo and upload it. I can't share the final photos until after the event this Saturday, but I have a lot of build photos, and I can start sharing some of those now!

(Also, if you are in Seattle, you should totally come to the event and see them in person https://www.facebook.com/events/1225875390874192)

Although I'm only 3D printing some of the pieces, to find a scale and fit I liked for all of the parts, I started out by 3D modeling everything in Fusion360, so I'll start my thread with some renders of my 3D model.

VK-Machine-Mark-II-v25-Front.png
VK-Machine-Mark-II-v25-Back.png
 
Looking good; eager to see the final product. Btw, did you see the whole pic collection we have at Propsummit?
 
I did. I took a bunch of screenshots from my Blu-Ray, the old photos of the original build, plus some stuff on Propsummit to help with making my "design" (obviously I don't take credit for anything other than making a version of it designed around the camera and screen we wanted to use).

There are definitely some things I'd do differently with more time (The bulk of the work building this was only over 4 days), and I'm having such a great time with this, I will probably make one for myself in the near future with the tweaks I want.

joberg said:
Looking good; eager to see the final product. Btw, did you see the whole pic collection we have at Propsummit?
Click to expand...
 
Good, one of our member at Propsummit is making a fully workable V.K. (seems simple, but that prop is not for the faint of heart;)) Eager to see yours and the final result!
 
I just turned them over to the guy at the museum to hook up the cameras and screens. I'll report back on Sunday with photos from the Saturday night event. Building 3 VK's in 6 days was a little insane. I'm going to take a break and work on some other projects but then I'm going to have to make one of these for myself at my leisure so i can not cut as many corners as I had to on this rush job!
 
Yes, it's insane:eek!! So, did you vacu-formed some of the pieces, 3-D some others and scratch built/mold the rest? Would be fun to see the WIP pics and the way you did those;)
 
To answer your question first - everything is either 3D printed or scratch built - no vacuum forming!

Now that the event is over, I'm going to work on writing up my build and posting WIP photos. In the meantime though, here are a couple of photos from last night!

2017-09-30 19.20.43.jpg
 
Not bad for a rush job. What kind of cam & screen did you use. I see that it made for a challenge to get the set-up working within the confine of the design. (size of the big screen?)
 
Probably not surprisingly, I'm the most disappointed in how the camera and screen were connected which is the one part I didn't do :) Based on the specs the person doing the electronics gave me (which was predetermined before I was brought on to the project), I built everything around those two things making sure there were adequate channels and tunnels everywhere to wire things up.

I've asked the guy what happened and why the wires ran crazy all outside of the machine (which of course nobody at the party really noticed because they aren't replica prop people), but I haven't heard back yet. I honestly think he needed more time than he told me and rushed to get it done last minute, especially because some of the cables on one of the machines were actually done correctly. I'm working with a friend of mine who has done a lot of arduino and raspberry pi work on doing the electronics better on my next version :)

joberg said:
Not bad for a rush job. What kind of cam & screen did you use. I see that it made for a challenge to get the set-up working within the confine of the design. (size of the big screen?)
Click to expand...
 
I would be interested to know what kind of tech your friend is going to use. Always a challenge to find working screen when trying to repro a working V.K.
 
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