Merry Christmas, or the secular, religious, or pagan holiday of your choice.
I love this little Christmas ornament from Instructables, so I decided to build some a few years ago and give them as gifts. The pictures show my completed bots.
I tried to put personality into each bot; each bears an individual holiday greeting. Chef has a hand-hammered knife and an LED ‘Open’ sign. Cy included a spring bobble-head so the LED displays the classic Cylon wandering eye. Leia has her signature hair-do and a blaster.
I had trouble getting the original Instructables circuit working, so I substituted this Darkness Detecting circuit from our friends at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. The cool thing about this simple little circuit is that the solar panel effectively acts as the dark detector. When there’s no light to power the solar panel, a PNP transistor is activated, which allows the flashing LED to be powered from the battery. While the lights are on, the LED is off.
I extended a copper wire down through the robot body, which can either be used to make a stand, or you can put one of these little fellas on a Christmas tree by wrapping the wire around a branch.
Surplus cell phone batteries are charged by the solar panels. I found a cheap source for small solar panels at the Electronic Goldmine. The panels I got produced about 3.5V, which worked perfectly for my purposes.
My friends and family still enjoy their robots, and display the proudly.
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