Meet Mr. Wallplate, an animatronic wall plate that speaks to you

Interactive robots always bring an element of intrigue, and even more so when they feature unusual parts and techniques to perform their actions. Mr. Wallplate, affectionately named by Tony K on Instructables, is one such robot that is contained within an electrical wall plate and uses a servo motor connected to an Arduino UNO Rev3 for mouth movement.

The circuit for Mr. Wallplate is not very complex, as a single Arduino handles all of the processing. Users are able to control the robot with an IR remote thanks to a corresponding receiver that passes along the encoded signals to the Uno for parsing. After a valid code has been found, the Talkie library in the sketch accepts speech synthesis commands before converting them into waveforms for outputting to an amplifier. One of the more challenging aspects was getting the speech to align with the mouth moving, and Tony’s solution was to simply move the servo a predetermined amount based on the word.

After ensuring the electronics worked as intended, Tony fabricated the bot from a clear plastic bottle, a metallic toggle/duplex switch plate for the face, two halves of a ping pong ball for the eyes, and a ponytail holder for the lips. As seen in the demo video below, Tony’s creation is certainly captivating while it talks.

More info about how Mr. Wallplate was constructed can be found here its write-up.

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