Ivan is a robot of many forms, all integrated together into some collective robot entity. After this communal Ivan project sort of faded into oblivion last year, I kept the robotic base of Ivan as a perpetual reminder to one day begin again. Ivan is my friend for life of robotic form and if you build him you can have your own Ivan too, so even if at times i stray, Ivan is always there waiting to be developed further. At any rate, the image below shows what I recently did with Ivan.

This part of Ivan's physical form is affectionately known as "the Salad Spinner" because of it's rotating bowl, the bottom of which counterrotates at full speed and the walls of which rotate at 1/3 of full speed. it is also reversible under control of it's brains, an Adafruit Metro Mini board and it's brawn, a SN754410 motor driver chip.

At the moment the bottom's attachment hole is stripped so I need to make a thingie that grips the D-slot better somehow. I plan on doing that tonight. The microphone has a half wave rectifier (a diode) and a low pass filter (an RC circuit) to convert the audio into an noise level for telling the circuit whether to spin or not (not if nobody is making noise, spin if there is noise). This prevents the device from running all night long when no people are nearby.

It's not very smart and it does not communicate with other devices, but it has some coolness in it's own silly way. Also I just got in the mail some jingle bells to put in the bowl. As soon as I fix the grip on the shaft (probably with a gripper tightened with tie wraps), I will test it with the jingle bells and attempt to make it play jingle bells, which of course goes like this:

JIngle Bells

Batman smells

Robin laid an egg

The batmobile

Lost it's wheel

And the Joker got awaaay!

(or something like that. Les out, praise the Lord!).