Full size Dalek robot made with Arduino and Adafruit Wave Shield #DrWho #arduino
Thanks to Andy for sending in this awesome Dalek project! Read more on his blog here.
Soon after finishing my one-fifth scale Dalek Robot, I started work on a full size Dalek. This one is made from a combination of plywood, cardboard, PVC plumbing and acrylic Christmas decorations plus a good deal of duct tape and glue. Originally I made a paper mache dome but I couldn’t get it looking right so I cheated and purchased a fiber glass dome from a Dalek builder in the UK.
There have been many variations of the Dalek design on Doctor Who over the years and this one is based on those featured in the story “Genesis of the Daleks” with Tom Baker as the Doctor. These are the Daleks that I watched the most as child. Here’s a photo of the originals.
Doctor Who was a low budget show at this time and the build quality of the Daleks wasn’t the best. Brush strokes can be seen in some shots and there is quite a bit of variance between individual Daleks, so I chose to take some liberties with my interpretation (and cut many a corner to keep time and cost to a minimum).
When I started out on the project I had grand ambitions for turning this into a robot as well but I haven’t made that happen yet. Instead I have installed an Arduino and an Adafruit wave shield that I can use either as a voice changer or I can have it play sound clips that I downloaded from the Doctor Who web site.
Adafruit Wave Shield for Arduino Kit: Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It’s low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer. Read more.
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