small step towards creating a monster - the interaction

Carl Drohomereski was in studio today guest critiquing and giving us some tutorials and general information about circuit boards. The attempt today was for me to get two or more of my machines interacting with each other, in any way possible at this point. I basically went through my resources and tried to look at the parts of which could be useful and found that sensors were a good starting point.

I chose to use my two vivisection victims at this point and branch out later once I have a better understanding of how everything works together. Both toys have hand sensors, motors and moving limbs so I decided to create an interaction between the two of them making use of these functions. My goal after a few hours of assessing the situation was to activate the Teletubby's walking function through the use of Elmo, however possible. Originally I hoped to activate Elmo through a sensor transmitted from Po (this is the Teletubby) that I had taken from the Wuvluv but this was proving too difficult at this stage of the game. After speaking to Carl I discovered that to start simple I would attempt to activate Po's walking through triggering the actions of Elmo, causing a chain reaction. This also offers me the opportunity to link more than one toy together to create a larger chain reaction at a later date with more extensive reactions taking place.

The best way to do this was through a circuit created on the solderless breadboard. I decided to take all of Po's senses away so that he was forced to react to Elmo. From here a series of tests were preformed to see how this could be done, which is when I discovered that one of the motors running Elmo was the same amount of volts which were required to bring Po to life. From here I separated the sensor wires (green) on Po and I connected them to the one side of the circuit that I had created on the breadboard. I then attached two additional wires to the motor on Elmo's back and connected these to the opposite side of the circuit on the breadboard. In between the two sets of wires coming from Po and Elmo on the breadboard was a switch (5V, DPDT). Once connected to the power source the circuit containing the switch acted as a bridge between the two machines allowing their interaction which I was hoping to achieve. The action that was obtained was that when Elmo's hand sensor was pushed and he began to move it sent a signal over to Po which caused him to walk in unison!

I realize that this is probably a small step to figuring out or achieving a true monster but at this point I feel like I have already learned so much and am excited to work towards further interaction with my creatures.