Daniel
(see all parts of "building a home robot")
A Raspberry Pi touchscreen is used to show Rooberts face. So it can´t be used to show status information like battery state or the “feelings” of its python finite state machine.
Fortunately the body front was still missing – so this seemed to be a good place to mount additional optical output.
I tried several small LCD- and OLED Displays, but they didn’t please me.
In the end I used an 8x8 Neopixel array, a 24 Neopixel ring and a 1 Neopixel lighted big button.
In the beginning the 8x8 pixel array was too bright to see the 8x8 pixel as one image. After attaching a 3d printed cover it looked like quadratic pixels.
The python code can read a GIF file and display it on the 8x8 pixel display. When in idle mode, Roobert shows a beating heart GIF.
The outer ring of Neopixels shows the battery state when driving around and the buttons Neopixel glows up when it seems to be a good idea to press it now.
