I got my new 4″ speakers mounted in the frame today. I made some simple brackets that bolt onto the side of the supports for the front vents.

I started off with a long length of 1-1/2″ x 1/8″ L shaped extruded aluminum. I cut off two 8″ lengths that would become the side brackets.

The brackets will wrap around the side of the front vent supports, with the speakers bolted to the back.

I drilled 4 holes in each, two larger one’s to allow me access to the screws holding the vents in place, then two more to bolt the new support on.

I then cut away a fair amount of the aluminum to allow the speaker to poke through.

Next I had to tap a bunch of holes to attach the speakers – I hate tapping holes

I tend to do things in small step, for example I fitted the first speaker, tested everything then went back and drilled, taped and fitted the second. All to often I fail if I try do too much at the same time to cut corners.

Here’s the two speakers installed and the top vent surround in place. I’m hoping to use some rare earth magnets to secure the blue surround to the frame.

I’m still concerned that the front vents will block too much sound, so I’m tempted to move one of the speakers into the skirt to bounce sound of the floor.

As promise here’s the demo video of the new CF-III setup. Sorry it’s so long.

P.S. Don’t forget the laptop is only used to show the diagnostic messages. It’s not needed for normal operation. Electrically this setup is exactly the same as all the other CF-II/CF-III systems in droids today. I’ve only added my custom code to add the extra functionality.

I’d ordered a bunch of super strong ‘earth’ magnets last week and they arrived today. I’m hoping to use them in quite a few spots, hence the tall stacks.

The larger 3/4″ discs will be used to secure the battery boxes to the feet, the rods will be used on the removable back door, and the small 3/8″ discs in various spots, like securing the shoulder hubs to the legs for easy removal, and holding the front blue panel around the vents. I’m also going to experiment with using them to hold panels and doors closed, but they maybe too strong.

I’m really excited to share some programming work I’ve been doing on my sound system the last few days. I don’t think anyone has done this before with the CF-III within the group.

Some background, I was a little disappointed that the CF-III was only able to trigger one set of random or sequenced sounds, plus one sound per remaining switch/contact. And like a lot of people I was frustrated with having to name all the files 0AC.WAV, 1FC.WAV etc. etc. Talk about getting confused.

What I really wanted was to have multiple banks of sounds, both for generic sounds, chatting/chirps sounds, and multiple banks of music. Try as I might with all the HEX file naming I couldn’t get it to work – and emails to ACS confirmed that I was asking too much of the CFSOUND.INI file.

So I decided to throw the CFSOUND.INI away and try writing my own program in ACS BASIC that would provide at least the same functionality that most people setup today, plus a lot more.

If you saw my post from a few days ago, you’ll know that I have two RF Remotes hooked into my CF-III, a 4 channel relay which handles volume and a 12 channel relay for triggering sounds.

By moving to hand written code in the CFSOUND.BAS file I was able to do everything I wanted plus more. Here’s a round down.

New Functionality – All Uniquely Addressable

• Remote Volume Control
• Two banks of music, with easy toggle select. 12 sounds total, all uniquely addressable
• Generic Sound bank (20 wav files)
• Chirpy/Chatting Sound bank (15 wav files)
• Multiple Whistle Sounds on one key
• Multiple Sad Sounds on one key
• Long and Short version of the Leia message
• Scream
• Short Circuit
• Random Sound Mode – Toggle on/off random sound playing – just press a button an leave R2 talk to himself at random intervals.
• Easy to add more sounds to each bank
• Quick boot time. CF-III is ready in seconds instead of the normal boot time measured in minutes when you have lots of files.

And to top it off I can call my sound files meaningful names for easy changes in the future. No more HEX coded files. e.g. You can now have files called “chirp.wav”, “scream.wav” and “vader.wav”.

This is all via a standard CF-III and your basic RF Remote/Receiver. Nothing extra is needed.

The last couple of nights have been very entertaining and a little painful trying to work around the limits of the BASIC programming language when I’m used to programming in C or PHP. I know I’ve learned or re-learned a lot since I last time wrote a BASIC program 25 years ago.

I think my favorite addition is the random sound mode. So I can leave R2 chatting away while I concentrate on driving 🙂

I’m really excited that I was able to get all this done, and I will hopefully be posting the CFSOUND.BAS program file once I’ve done some more testing.

Watch this space for a demo video soon.

Here’s a short video giving an overview of the newly reconfigured sound system.

Then new dome motor (a surplus Pittman GM9236) arrived today and I thought I’d share a short video to compare it to the original underpowered GM9413 motor I had been using.

It’s still runs at 12V, so no need to upgrade my electrical system to 24V. It spins a lot faster and definitely has a lot more torque.

Here’s the original GM9413 for comparison.

And finally, here’s a quick side by side shot of the two motors, the GM9236 is on the left. It’s a little bit longer and has a small shaft at the bottom which I think is to connect an encoding wheel to.

It had a busy weekend, but I did find some time to work on R2. I decided to continue focusing on the sound system and electronics in general as it’s easier to start and stop with minimum mess and cleanup.

I did hear back from ACS about the specs on the internal amplifier in the CF3 sound system. It turns out I was right and it can deliver 25W per channel, or 50W total. Their manual is rather vague and states it can only do 20W total, so I’m glad I checked now. I bought some new generic 4 1/2″ 4 ohm 30W speakers to test and they sound pretty good and seem louder and clearer than the single 15W horn speak I was using. Each speaker is connected to it’s down channel and delivers more sound than my ears could handle comfortably. I’m probably going to mount them behind the front vents for now, but may end up moving one into the skirt to bounce some sound off the floor to help it travel further and in more directions.

With the speakers out of the way I started to think about how I had the electronics laid out. Some of you may remember this is what my original electronic mounting panel looked like for C4.

It’s worked great, but I need to add a few things and as it stands, once the skins go on, I think it will be hard to use the hinged electronics panel to get access to the internals of the droid for maintenance, e.g. the batteries. I’m thinking it maybe simpler to move some or all of it internally to the droid.

With that said I started to disassemble the rear panel. I needed to do it anyway to add the Contact 24 I/O daughter card to the CF3 sound system. This will give me more options on the range of sounds I can trigger.

I’d been putting this off for a while as everything was working okay, and I could sort of live with only being able to trigger two banks of random sound vs the possibility of twelve banks.

With the everything disassembled adding the daughter board to the CF3 was a snap.

While I had the CF3 open I wanted to add an external connector to the white 3 pin header which bring out the volume control. It’s located just below the new Contact 24 daughter board and next to the CF card slot. I plan on connecting it to 2 channels on an RF receiver/relay board to allow me to adjust volume remotely.

The plug is pretty standard and I ended up buying a $2 fan extension cable as I couldn’t find loose plugs locally.

But there was a slight problem, the plug is too long and stops you from putting the Contact 24 card back in it’s place so I had to chop down the plug a bit.

I drilled a hole in the side of the box for the wire to pass through

I temporarily wired up the three contacts (up, down, common ground) to my RF receiver to try it out and it worked first time which surprised me. The plan is to have the volume on it’s own RF remote as I wanted to keep all 12 channels free on my original RF remote just to trigger sounds.

Now that the Contact 24 board was in place, I could start wiring up all 12 channels to the RF receiver using some hacked-up twisted pair LAN cable I had laying around.

Basically all the connectors labeled “A” on the RF receiver are connected to the adjacent “A” and then over to the common ground on the CF3 sound system. Then I connected the “B” connector of each relay over to a contact on the CF3. Starting at the top left going down is relay 1 thru 7, then on right starting at the bottom going up is relay 8 thru 12 . Each connections maps over to contacts 1-12 on the Contact Sense 24 board in the CF3.

This is the CF3/Contact Sense 24 side of the wiring. Each block of green plugs/connectors has 10 connections. The outside two are common ground. I’m only using one from each block and routing it over to the the two halves of the remote relay board (brown wire)

Here’s the the connections on the smaller 4 channel RF Receive from the CF3 volume cable. Note that on the 4 channel receiver we’re using connections B and C instead of A and B. This caught me of guard as the documentation that comes with the board is incorrect.

I’m going to Velcro each of the RF Receiver to the top of the CF3 case.

Right now I have the two RF remotes Velcro’d to the side of my transmitter, but I’m tempted to create a small box with better switches on it similar to the Vantec KeyCoder and have the RF transmitters hidden inside.

And finally here’s a wiring diagram I created that will hopefully make things a little easier to understand. There’s also a PDF version for printing.

Next step is to reprogram the CF memory card to use all 12 channels of the remote.

When out and about with R2 or when conversation turns to hobbies and invariable R2 building, it’s always handy to have a card ready with your contact information.

I’d created a simple business card design to use a Celebration 4, but I gave away my last one today, so I decided to create some new one’s tonight. What do you think?

Standard trading cards are a little larger than a business card so I may shrink them down to fit in my wallet easier.

[edit] Here’s the front and back of the new smaller business card next to the original larger trading card on top. I printed them on heavy card stock using my inkjet printer and they came out great.