Dancing Baby Groot

Here is what my finished dancing baby Groot looks like! Now lets take a look at how we got here.

Also worth noting, Groot was hand knit by Lauren Mocilac, she does fabulous work and she also takes requests!

This was the original toy I got. I couldn't find the original "movin' and groovin'" toy to take apart. This one unfortunately was much more difficult to work with. It had a different song already programmed, and it was super flimsy. But it was a start.

This was what the guts of the original looked like. Basic of basic. I didn't know what I was getting into yet. I purchased this several months ago with these intentions, but procrastinated like crazy.

Here is the inside of the heart of Groot. It was a terribly crappy board with mostly hot-glued pieces. It did have a decent speak which I salvaged, but besides the motor and the speaker, that's all.

I had a hard time assembling all the pieces since I really didn't know what I'd need. I originally wanted a motion sensor, but it turned out to be so sensitive, I couldn't stand it, so I switched it out for a push button. I also used a Spark Core for some internet connectivity. I also originally planned to use the battery pack, but decided that plugging it in would be easier.

I also got the sound board from here. Product worked great, and I was very sick of that Jackson 5 song by the end of this.

This was tough since it was my first time soldering anything. So there was a lot of mess-ups, but with some help, It started coming together.

Started to solder onto an awesome protoboard from this guy!

Nice looking, clean cables.

Syncing up the motor and the music proved to be most difficult, but it turned out to be great. Here is a gist of my code for the little guy.

https://gist.github.com/kmmonk/b9dc12efeb43fde9d04...

I want to have a whole page to thank the most awesome David Middlecamp. He worked extremely hard on this with me, more than me in most parts. His knowledge of this stuff was fantastic and I very much enjoyed the time working on this together in the basement, watching Star Trek TNG. If it wasn't for him, this project would not have been possible.