Dancing Baby Groot

Hello Spark Community!

I wanted to share my project of my dancing baby groot from the guardian of the galaxy movie. My girlfriend loved groot and especially loved the daning baby groot at the end, so i sought out to make it a reality for her. Shall we dive into the project?

Here is what the final product looks like!

Baby Groot in all his Glory!

He was hand knit by the wonderful Lauren Mocilac. Check her out at https://www.etsy.com/shop/MountainTopsCrochet?ref=l2-shopheader-name

Close up of the face.

The original toy

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.

Skeleton

Heres the bare bones of the original toy

starting to take it all apart

Motor, speaker, and case inside.

Guts

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 speaker which I salvaged, but besides the motor and the speaker, that’s all.

Battery base

It fell apart with almost no effort.

Starting to map it out

Lots of crude EE drawing of the way to do it. None of it was correct. I’m NOT an EE. Not even close.

Sound board

I ordered a sound board off some cheesy site that makes them for cards. I took the nicer speaker from the original toy and soldered it to the board for better sound.

Motion sensor

I originally had it wired up to this guy, but it was sooooo sensitive, I had to just put a push button on it so it would stop going off.

SPARK CORE!

You guys know what that is :smile:

Breadboard! yay

Prototyping up on it.

Undershot of the protoboard

I found an awesome protoboard from this guy. After using the breadboard, I started soldering to this guy. Made it compact and easy to fit into the old case.

Link to the protoboard guys site: https://www.tindie.com/products/justinm/three-pack-of-protoboard-for-sparkcore/

Headers

Mess of wires

More wire-filled shots

Plug it in, plug it in!

I originally set out to use the batter pack that came with it, so it would always be compact and movable, but decided the Spark Core being on a lot would drain them pretty quickly, so i opted for a wall charger. Much much better plan. Now I never have to buy batteries for it.

Cleaner looking wires

:smiley:

Groot at the office

Here he is at the office in my hand. This was before I finished him.

Here is a link to a gist of his code.

Here is a link to him dancing since imgur doesn’t do videos. http://www.instructables.com/file/F59YCOJI3PJPCVP/

Also, please check out my instructables page with this guy in it! http://www.instructables.com/id/Dancing-Baby-Groot/

Thanks for taking the time to look at my pictures and stuff!

9 Likes

love it love it love it love it.

Now how to make a growing baby groot…

I love groot and that baby groot ROCKS! Nice job @kmmonk :wink:

He’s going to have more features down the line. But I wanted to get him out in the world. More stuff to come from Groot!

3 Likes

Awesome! Thanks for sharing :slight_smile: