Blog — 80s

When I was a kid I loved Knight Rider.  I had a plastic toy KITT car that  would play sounds from the show when you pressed the license plate. It was a great toy.  I recently  looked it up online and was thinking about buying one. They weren't crazy expensive. But then I got to thinking, I could make that car and something better.  The best thing about all of the affordable tech we have now is that you can affordably make a lot of things you dreamed of as a kid pretty easily. I figured 3D printing would be...

The Unicron Speech and Light Kits are finally available!  You can purchase them here for $165 https://cchobbyfun.com/products/haslab-unicron-speech-and-light-upgrade The kits allow you to add speech and light to your Haslab Unicron kit. They can be controlled via bluetooth from an iPhone or Android device. The kit comes with most of the electronics already installed in an easy to mount box.  You can see the instructions here. Here's a quick demo and an overview of some changes made in the production kit:

A number of people contacted me expressing interest in a kit of the sound/speech mod I did for my Haslab Unicron. I'm open to the idea but I wanted to first explain the details of how the mod is installed.  I posted a video to make it clear:   I think the most important thing to understand is that installation of the electronics requires you install the upgrade kit to split robot/planet modes.  It's not super hard but I know a lot of people are sensitive about mods to their purchases. That being said if there is still interest, I...

Got the sound and light installation for my Haslab Unicron complete.  You can read the first blog post here. The final install keeps most of the electronics inside Unicron with only the power bank and a USB cable exposed in the rear.  The final setup has a seven segment WS2812B led strip, Circuit Playground Bluefruit (CPB), DFPlayer Mini, a 3" speaker and a compact power bank for the power.  The code relies on the existing Adafruit Bluetooth Lowe Engergy (BLE) libraries for Bluetooth control. This lets me control the sounds and lights from my iPhone or an Apple Watch.  I'm...