>>41846 >>41861 Ahh, now I understand! Thanks, Anon. BTW, @GreerTech is right: this is a great solution to the problem of IRL facial animation. Simple, yet effective & cute. I'd call that elegant! Cheers, Mechnomancer. :^) <---> Karakuri I'd recommend to you and other'nons here getting one of these papercraft toy books (I have the one listed; its high-quality cardstock paper cutouts inside). This is an ancient tradition of making child's toys from paper, and I feel it can inform some of our efforts here if we give it a chance. Super-inexpensive way to do things. * Cheers. :^) https://takemy.money/mechanical-paper-animal-toys-from-japan --- * And ofc, cf. our own Papercraft Waifu thread! :D ( >>271 )

SPUD's face is more or less calibrated, I just need to adjust the mouth panel as it is fully retracted, but still sticking out giving her a poggy/soy face. For ease of use I'm just using gorilla tape to hold her face on lol. And as usual mouth servo sounds are amplified due to phone audio silliness.

>>41883 Very cute

>>41883 Nice! Could the shaking be lessened?

>>41883 Naicu! Very responsive reactions. I forget, are you accounting for speech/mouth synchronizations yet, Anon?

>>41888 >robo-parkinsons Major reason for the shakes is the mouth linkage hitting the eye panel (picrel). I'll have to either a) move the mouth panel down so the mouth linkage doesn't have to go as high or b: move the entire face down so the mouth linkage doesn't have to go as high. Each one is just as annoying as the other. >>41894 >speech/mouth synchronizations yet, Anon? yeah, I was just letting the lip synch service run the last "simon says" she did. I forgot to charge her bluetooth speaker fren so no audio. It's basic mouth flaps based on the amplitude of the .wav file. I might try to smooth out the jaw motion a bit. I couldn't figure out asynchronous code very well so I just run 2 python scripts (aka separate processes) at the same time in different terminal windows (or 1 in thonny lol): 1 for the lip synching and 1 for the LLM/voice commands.

>>41900 >Each one is just as annoying as the other. What about changing the linkage itself? >>41900 >I might try to smooth out the jaw motion a bit. Looking forward, as usual. :^) >I couldn't figure out asynchronous code very well so I just run 2 python scripts C++ has numerous solutions, but I'm not too sure about Python. Does it support even just multithreading rn? Regardless, great progress! Keep going, Mechnomancer. Cheers. :^)

>>41901 >What about changing the linkage itself? There isn't a lot of room behind the face for additional bits (picrel), plus no new bits my printer is clogged and I have more exhibitions to get ready for in the upcoming weeks. Just wanna get SPUD back operational. Might just readjust the mouthpanel or add more onto the eyepanel so it slides over the mouthlinkage instead of colliding. >Python multithrooding? Theoretically, yes. In various ways that are different for nerdy technical ACKSHUALLY reasons. But for unknown reasons some libraries literally won't work when multi-threading (or subprocesses or whatever) in the same script with other libraries for some magical juu juu technical reason. Will probably get around to setting up code to automagically start/stop other python scripts program thingies.

>>41902 Ahh, understood now. Well I hope you get it all sorted before your upcoming exhibitions. Regardless, I think dear SPUD will be a hit for you, whether or no. >Will probably get around to setting up code to automagically start/stop other python scripts program thingies. That might work. Good luck, Anon! Cheers. :^)

SPUD explains some of the things for me. Have 2 image recognition libraries running: 1 for objects, one for general environments. I have to do a few adjustments to make, such as her eyebrows wriggling when she talks and (eventually) some eyeball adjustment, but she's functional and looking better than she did :)

>>42014 POTD Very exciting to see this part working more smoothly, Mechnomancer. Cheers. :^) FORWARD!

>>42014 Nice! It's really cool to see the near completed prototype. It's definitely good enough for promotion, that's for sure! She is right, robowaifus are here to stay!

Finally got around to recording a vid of the tootsie action.

>>42218 Heh, cute! >that clack Can you find a way to bumper them so kids don't have the full "SPUD Scissortoes of Death!" experience? Might make them a little nervous being down close where they are and all. Cheers, Mechnomancer. GG! :^)

>>42219 >"SPUD Scissortoes of Death!" Funny enough that was never an issue. Kids saw her reacting to me saying "toes" and they ran right over to try to get her to do it :D

>>42225 Oh that's good then! :^)

>>42218 Super cute

>>42218 So you suppose harpy girls would be easier to engineer than standard human feet?

>>42218 We have robowaifu feet videos before GTA 6 >>42230 "I used the harpies to destroy the harpies"

>>42234 >robowaifu feet videos Kek A demo of SPUD's gui. Because it runs asynchronously it slows the llm down to a crawl but at least the preprogrammed functions are in real-time. I'll try to integrate it into the main program and make it toggle-able. Also have a reason to redo spuds face again (mostly fixing the eyes). She did a bit of a faceplant during setup. Runs fine tho.

>>42234 KEK >>42239 That's actually really cute. Great work on the GUI, keep it simplistic for this environment! The timings seem a bit off? I'm sure you can solve the synchrony & compute resource-allocation issues, Mechnomancer. My own plan is to have a smol mesh of 4 SBCs onboard the robowaifu to distribute compute loads. >faceplant Ahh. I noticed her eyebrows/lids were a little off before. I hope nothing structural needs replacement. Regardless, dear SPUD is coming right along! Nice work Anon, keep it up. Cheers. :^)

>>42241 >The timings seem a bit off? Yeah, I threw it together in less than an hour. I'll solve the synchrony issue by only having the image window be updated after the AI does its shenanigans. I talked with a puppet maker who was taught by Tom McLaughlin (of Dark Crystal/Jim Henson fame) and listened to his panel. He does traditional cloth work (I wish I got a pic of his "Beast" for a children's production of Beauty and the Beast) and works with silicone by creating a foam shell (furniture or eva foam) then spreading/smoothing silicone (aka bathroom caulking) over it. It has given me some ideas how to do a "rubber" face that would be easy and (hopefully) not creepy. Of course I'd have to get my 3d printer back running again so I could make the servo frame for it. In the meantime I could probably do some tests to try adding certain curves to SPUD's 2d cosplay.

>>42252 Ahh, makes sense. I hope it turns out being just that simple! :^) >It has given me some ideas how to do a "rubber" face that would be easy and (hopefully) not creepy. Neat! Good luck with this effort Mechnomancer. Looking forward to seeing the results. Cheers. :^)

I've been working on a closed-loop motor control system (pic rel). An arduino acts as an analog reader sending data on the serial bus (with a servo breakout board acting as a breakout board for motor encoders aka potentiometers), while a MCP23017 (red glowing jellybean) sends out digital signals via I2C which get amplified by the ULN2003 (purple guy). Arduino isn't doing digital outputs because I discovered with other projects it can have power issues if you have too many digital outputs, and I don't have I2C analog readers because they didn't sample very fast (like 2 samples per second, could be user error but why bother when I already have something that works?) So is it SPUD-related? Not really. Or at least, not immediately. This allows the raspi to control motors via the MCP2307 (sending digital outputs to a separate motor controller) and read real joint position and act accordingly. This opens the doors for controlling many other types of motors, from smol hobby motors to 3500lb winches to screw-drive linear actuators, which is good because screw-drive linear actuators they only use power when moving. They tend to move slow but can easily be pushed beyond their voltage rating. So, maybe SPUD will have linear-actuator-based legs. Or I might just plop her on a big reciprocating spooder base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTtXNjmahzE

>>42385 THIS LOOKS AMAZING. I'm really glad to see your research in this area, Mechnomancer. If we can devise sophisticated motor control schemas using cheap COTS parts that will strongly solidify these efforts as every'non DIY projects. I hope you in fact create linear actuators for dear SPUD'S legs. We need more research in this area tbh. Looking forward to your progress, Anon! Cheers. :^)

You should make a github

>>42424 >github Eventually, I only wanna release properly documented stuff cuz I've encountered many a repository that isn't properly documented D:< I've gotten better at doing documentation during development (makes it easier to find & fix stuff) so that's more of a possibility. I also discovered a faster way to do graphics on the raspberry pi, so that means I'll be re-building Pringle to be even more optimized. Among faster render times I plan to put dependency installation right in the code so it is just run and done with a few other features.

>>42455 >I also discovered a faster way to do graphics on the raspberry pi, so that means I'll be re-building Pringle to be even more optimized. Among faster render times I plan to put dependency installation right in the code so it is just run and done with a few other features. Excellent! Looking forward to this, Mechnomancer.

A faster way of rendering graphics for raspberry pi is using Pygame. So I've been working on an even more basic SPUD PR model: it simply takes expressions from a sprite sheet via keywords. No lipsynching makes it easier to work with. I figure something simple and lightweight would be good to add to any project if you decide it should have a face. Could probably also use with AI if you scan the AI response for the keywords. Features: - Custom sprite size (must be square tho) - fullscreen and scales up to your monitor resolution - keywords determined via external txt file (left to right) - gives a warning if your spritesheet isn't perfectly proportioned - manual input to select faces (won't crash if you improperly reference one) Things I need to add before release: - dropbox.txt for expressions instead of an input prompt - setting custom sprite size without going into the code (another external .txt)

>>42942 Excellent! There's a reason vidya settled around this paradigm: fast, efficient, and easily-reconfigured. Nice work, Mechnomancer. BTW, I'll presume this is primarily for dear Pringle instead of dear SPUD?

>>42945 Ah yes. It is indeed for Pringle. Forgot to mention that. I got the idea today and threw it together in like an hour. Also got in a shipment of materials to make some body covering for SPUD and could possibly be repurposed into a minimum viable waifu. But I got some outdoor things to do before I get snowed in for real -got a blizzard and it all melted, heh- and focus all my energies on SPUDliness. For the custom sprite size I might just whip up a configuration file protocol for python that looks for things like "sprite_size = 52" in any order in the txt file, and if a config isn't found uses the defaults in the script and gives a console message to the user. It would make modularity easier to implement in future.

>>42952 Excellent. Keep the stove hot! Cheers, Mechnomancer. :^)

>>42942 Nice! I like all the different faces, nice work!

>>42960 I yoinked them off an image search lol. Using pygame seems to run much faster for basic image manipulation, so hopefully this will serve as a good proof-of-concept for replacing SPUD's indicator graphics.

Pringle is shocked a status LED is shining through the 2nd curved OLED screen I have. I'm probably gonna make her a papercraft mecha musume helmet.

>>43058 Nice!

>>43058 >Pringle is shocked a status LED is shining through the 2nd curved OLED screen I have. <"It's a feature, not a bug!"' :D >I'm probably gonna make her a papercraft mecha musume helmet. <"No one cared who I was until I put on the mask." --- Very cool. This looks pretty sweet, Anon. I like where you're going with dear Pringle's new design motif. Please keep us all up to date on her progress! Cheers. :^)

>>43062 >Please keep us all up to date on her progress! Tada! Some slight alignment issues but that is a graphics problem not a code problem.

>>43068 VERY COOL!! That curved screen really gives some dimensionality to her face. Really looking forward to where you go with this, Mechnomancer. Cheers. :^)

Hastily gave pringle some ears so she looks a bit less gundam and more Samurai Pizza cat :D

>>43086 LOL. A cute! :D

>>43086 Y'all are really out here trying fuck mouse cosplay BMO instead of talking to any woman ever, smh

>>43090 Oh hi obvious troll. To answer your question, yes, and? @Chobitsu obvious troll

>>43090 TFW the cute college chicks oogling me during the numerous exhibitions of my robits. I must science before I procreate. I might make a medabot-size walking robit body for our Samurai Pizza Cat. Erm, Samurai Pizza Mouse. Depends how bored I get and how severely I get snowed in this year.

>>43093 >I might make a medabot-size walking robit body for our Samurai Pizza Cat. Neat! That's about the size I envisioned for the initial prototype of dear Sumomo-chan (a bit smol'r, actually... ~45cm or so). >Medarot Heh, haven't watched that in years. I'll be doing so a bit during the holidays. Cheers, Mechnomancer. :^)

I have an idea: make a bunch of reaction image faces Shocked, smug, happy, etc If you male those, I (and hopefully others) will use them online.

>>43192 >reaction images Yeah I've been doing that occasionally in other online communities lol Been mucking around with SPUD's code in my free time and: A) figured out how to segment the LLM's response into roughly 7 words to feed to the TTS. LLMs usually go by tokens and sometimes they contain a fraction of a word like so the phrase "I ate an apple!" might be the tokens "I a", "te an"," app","le!". A little tricky, mostly counting spaces and splitting tokens up. Just couldn't be bothered to figure it out until now. B) sequential speech. Before, SPUD would speak as the response is generated by the LLM so any backlog would be ignored. But now everything goes in a nice tidy list. C) image/object recognition AI via voice command. Apparently she sees what looks like a computer monitor in an environment that looks like a cockpit :D Theoretically, there should now be only a brief pause before SPUD goes into a nearly contiguous response-a very slight pause indicates a gap in the 7 word chunks but not noticeable unless you listen closely for it. I just can't record proof thereof because all my bluetooth speakers are out of battery ^_^; I also have an idea for the construction of a rubbery face (and perhaps even a body someday) using a combo of some techniques I learned from a puppetmaker at the last convention I exhibited at and my own ideas. But that will probably wait until the new year. And maybe a return to LCD eyes, I don't know. Have to experiment.

>>43243 Interesting! You're making good progress with conversational AI. It definitely has applications beyond SPUD

>>43243 WOOT!! This is exciting, Mechnomancer. If you don't mind, I'll look into this for the dear HoloWaifu project?

>>43260 Well, the optimizations consist of relatively simple variable juggling. So not to hard for someone to implement themselves in python (or in another programming language). So feel free. To go into detail: As each token is generated, check for a space character and count them. if the count is 7 and there is a space in the current token you split it along the space, attaching the first half to your completed token chunk and send that to tts, then you set the second to the variable where the freshly generated tokens are added. Updated lip synch program works by checking a text file for list of .wavs and keeps track of where it is in the list. After each file is played (which consist of playing the .wav file audibly then going thru all the wav file frames checking amplitude and moving the mouth accordingly) it goes down the list. The list is only reset if instead of a filename there is the keyword "fin", otherwise it will wait until another filename is added to the list. the file_list.txt would look like "llmresponse_0.wav|llmresponse_1.wav|llmresponse_2.wav|fin" Thankfully playing a .wav doesn't take up much processing power. Interestingly, if the LLM hasn't been used in a while (or first starting up) the first response can take a while. Probably just loading it in/out of ram but it adds a bit of character: "oh the robit is daydreaming lol". For object/image recognition I use a Ultralytics YOLO model, I forget which. https://www.ultralytics.com/ Next thing I might do is check out how fast I can get a pose-estimation model running. Would be cute to get SPUD to mimick my arm movements. Gifrel https://youtu.be/AAkfToU3nAc?t=185