YottaRock Industries

Making Sox

Since seeing Lightyear back in early 2022, I have become fixated upon this friendly helpful robot feline that seems to always have an answer either with gadgets or helpful words. After seeing what is on offer by various companies for Sox, I have decided to make my own as most have messed up the shape of a cat (have most of them even seen what a cat looks like?!) or are charging ridiculous money for a statue. Only 1 has any electronics in it, and it is aimed at 6-9 year olds. 

Sox Goals

The goal of this project is to make a fully functioning Sox with the following capabilities:

• Talk
• Hear (stereo hearing)
• respond to commands
• walk
• be pet and respond
• eyes light up
• ears light up
• head spins 720°
• Laser chase
• See (cameras)

For this, I am basing the entire project off of a regular Raspbery Pi 4 8GB as it should have the processing power I need and be able to easily interface with the various pieces of hardware this will need. 

Parts

This project will need the following parts as determined so far

• Stereo cameras
• 2 digital microphone boards
• RGB LEDs for the eyes
• Red LEDs for the ears
• 11 servos for motion
  • 1 for each leg, 4
  • base of neck
  • top of neck
  • mouth 
  • eyelids
  • 2 for tail
  • Torso twist
• Speaker to talk
  • Amplifier to talk loudly
• Laser
• Switch
• Li ion  Batteries
• UPS
• Gyroscope sensor

Most of the sensors run on I2C connection, the microphones run on a separate standard. 

Testing so far

After a major issue with the stereo cameras I bought, I managed to get the replacement set to work first try. This will allow for depth perception algorithms to be executed by Sox so Sox can see not just images, but in 3d.