Its been nicknamed the tour ro-pot as its got an old pot noodle pot to use as a basic amplifier.

A (slightly fake) video is here:

Its fake as I added the sound samples later, as the video did not record. But it said them, honest.

The main hardware parts are:

Motor base - from Real Robots magazine

Brains - Arduino Duemilanova

Motor control - PCB in the Real Robots base

Sensors - LDR x 2 for light

Sensors - Ultrasonic for distance/object avoidance

Sensors - Microswitch for getting uder things

Audio module - MOD1007 SD sound module

Amplifier - old electronic kit

The software was based on the Arudino IDE. Its pretty basic and mainly uses the light level sensor values from the LDRs. It controls the motors to try and find the brightest point in the room. 

Randomly it shouts out samples (stored on the SD card on the audio module).

Addition sensors are a height sensor using a micro switch to stop it getting trapped under objects which are too high.

It also has an ultrasonic distance sensor which stops it bumping into objects.

It wanders around and shouts sarcastic samples (more to be added).

Sample creation was done using a text to speech converter and then tweeking it with audacity. The audio module uses the 4-bit .ad4 format, which is a bit of a faff.

A few things which were a bit annoying to sort out - the noise of the motors drowned out the speach, so I wanted it to stop the motors while saying stuff. I needed to read the busy output line from the sound module, but this did not read as a good digital signal (it was 3.3V) and so I had to read it as an analogue value and make decisions based upon that.

There is more work to do on smoothing out the motion, making better samples, getting it to do different samples in different situations.

Also - it runs on 4 x AA and 1 x PP3 rechargable battery, it would be good to have a recharging docking station....