Back in 2018, one of the donations I received was a Hearoid. This was donated by Benny Cash.
This is basically a slight variation on the Tommy Omnibot, which is also related to the
Radio Shack Robie Sr. One problem however, is that it did not come with the remote control,
which is sort of important for this unit.
Originally, I declined to accept the donation because it didn’t have the remote. However,
about a week later I got an email from an entirely different person saying that they
had found a spare remote for this exact unit. So, I emailed Benny back and I’m like “Well
hey! I found a remote for this so you can go ahead and send it.” And, he did. Unfortunately,
the guy with the remote was a no show. The remote never showed up and I never heard back
from him.
As such, the Hearoid just sat in the corner of my office room collecting dust, for 2 years
because I just didn’t know what to do with it. It needed extensive restoration work,
but I wasn’t sure how to repair it and still didn’t have a remote. But then I got an
email from Randi Rain who is an avid collector of these sort of robots and also has extensive
experience repairing them. By sheer coincidence, she also lives in the Fort Worth area and
so I invited her over to take a look at my Hearoid. She had a look at it and seemed to
think it would be a project she could handle. It was covered in dust from 2 years of sitting.
Randi took the Hearoid home with her and began to examine it. To test it, she put a new battery
in there. These things actually run on a 6V sealed lead-acid battery. It actually did
power on, but wouldn’t really do anything without the remote. Unfortunately, it turns
out the remote from the Omnibot and Radio Shack units wouldn’t work. Also the clock
has it’s own battery cells, and the terminals were all corroded.
So, it was time to disassemble the thing and one thing that became immediately obvious
is that it was full of dirt. As she opened bits of it, dirt ended up all over her workbench.
In order top open it, there are several screws on the bottom that needed to come out, but
every single one of them had a problem. There were dirt dauber nests inside every single
hole. She tried picking some of out out with a screwdriver. Ultimately, used WD-40 to rinse
some of it out. This worked for all of the screw holes except one. This one was so corroded
that there was just nothing left of the head, so she had to drill through the screw to get
it off. Of course, that helped get the unit apart, but then the rest of the screw was
still stuck in the plastic so, this presented a real problem, but she eventually prevailed.
The bottom section of the Hearoid contains the drive unit, which you can see here. And
it was going to need a little work, especially lubrication. And these axle shafts were also
very corroded, that will be dealt with shortly. But for the moment, here’s the inside of
the gearbox. You can see the motors are pretty small and go through some serious reduction
gears for the final drive. She went ahead and pulled all of these out so they could
be cleaned, inspected, and lubricated.
The motors themselves seemed to be seized up, which is not surprising for their age
and having sat so long. She was able to spray some WD-40 inside and managed to get them
spinning again. In fact, here’s a quick test of the motors by powering them directly.
She soaked the axels in CLR for a while to help clear off the corrosion.
While waiting on that, she went ahead and started to disassemble the body of the Hearoid
and what a lovely mess of cob webs and gnats were waiting inside. Fortunately, the circuit
boards appeared to be in decent condition. She used a hair dryer to pull off the decals,
since half of them were falling apart or falling off anyway.
The cassette recorder is located inside this little blue box. And it too was full of dirt
dauber nests in the screw holes. She did eventually get it open, and it did require a new belt,
which she had on hand.
Randi managed to find another broken Hearoid, believe it or not in worse shape than mine
was. But at least it did come with a remote, but the remote was itself quite a challenge.
It was yellowed, the battery contacts were all corroded, and it was missing the battery
door. So, she went ahead disassembled it, which did require desoldering the battery
terminals. And then she also removed the decals from the top with a hair dryer. She also popped
out all of the terminals so they could be cleaned.
At this point there was just a lot of extra disassembly to do.
So, Randi returned the case parts to me for retrobriting. But, before I could begin on
that, I had to take care of something else.
Now, while these parts are clean, they do seem to have like a lot of scuffs and black
marks and stuff on them, which I just don’t like retrobriting stuff like that.
You can see some of these pieces are just covered in black marks and I was pretty sure
alcohol and some elbow grease would clean this off. So, I got to work.
Next it was time to retrobrite, but as always it seems the weather was not going to cooperate.
Plus there was another problem. This was right at the beginning of the pandemic and thus
all of the store shelves were completely empty of paper products. I drove all around town
trying to find some extra paper towels, and finally found some.
I setup a makeshift retrobrite contraption in my studio. I just put all of the pieces
in one crate and then filled it up with water. Unfortunately, I did run into a bit of a problem
I didn’t anticipate. I couldn’t fill the crate up quite as far as I had planned because
I didn’t realize or notice that near the handles there were these holes in the side.
Thus, that became the limit for filling it up, which was just barely enough. Fortunately,
I still had some volume 40 clear liquid in the closet, since all of the salon supply
stores are closed due to the pandemic. And here we go, time to fire up the UV lights.
I wasn’t sure how long this would take since the last thing I did like this was really
fast, but also I knew the vast amount of water here would be diluting the peroxide. I checked
back after a couple of hours and found bubbles all over everything, which is a good sign
that it is working. Unfortunately, many of the smaller pieces were indeed floating to
the top, so I knew I’d have to check on this regularly to keep this under control.
Usually, I can just shake the various pieces to get the bubbles off.
Anyway it, looked like most of the pieces were done so I decided I’d empty the bucket
by siphoning the water into the bathtub like so. The bucket was much too heavy to move
without spilling water everywhere, so this seemed like the easiest solution. It took
about 10 minutes to empty most of the water out.
So how did it turn out? Well, all of the pieces look “better.” But some of them are still
yellow. So here are two identical pieces, but clearly one side of this robot was more
yellowed than the other. And this head piece here definitely needs some more work. And
this remote control is the worst. So, I decided to use a smaller bucket and work on some of
the stubborn pieces that needed extra time.
Now, one problem was, I was completely out of the clear 40 volume liquid. But, I did
still have some sodium percarbonate left over from the experiment I did before. This stuff
works just fine for retrobriting. The only reason I don’t use it more often is because
it makes the water corrosive to metals. Fortunately, I don’t have anything metal in this particular
tub, so it should be fine. So, we’ll give this a few hours and come back and check on
it.
And here we are. It took almost 2 days additional time to get these results. I mean, this piece
here was nearly brown when we started. But I’ll admit the results aren’t perfect.
For example, on this remote you can still see a contrast between the exposed and non
exposed areas. I could probably work on it another few days to get it perfect, but I
think it is good enough for now.
I returned all of the parts to Randi. And, one problem that was going to have to be dealt
with was these broken tie rods for the arms. All 4 of them were broken on this thing. Randi
is gluing this one back together with super glue, but probably not for the reason you
are thinking. Superglue is simply not strong enough to hold something like this. Instead,
she’s going to mold new ones from this old one.
She starts by gluing it down to a platform here. Then she builds up what is called a
dam around the object. Once that’s done, she pours in a silicone product, which will
form around the plastic creating the mold. In order to help get out any air bubbles from
the silicone, she puts it in a vacuum chamber and sucks out all of the air. This caused
the silicone to settle like this, so the solution is to add more silicone, and of course put
it back in the vacuum chamber again.
At this point, the silicone should be cured so it is time to take it out. She’ll make
a clean incision right down the center and attempt to remove the original tie rod. As
you can see, the super glue already broke just trying to remove the tie rod from the
mold.
The next step is to prepare the urethane, which will form the new part. She adds in
some tint to give it a color that will hopefully match the rest of the robot. Then the mold
is placed in a pressure cooker, and the urethane is poured into cast. She uses a hose with
compressed air to pressurize the container. This is exactly opposite of the vacuum chamber
used on the silicone mold, yet it’s purpose is exactly the same, which is to remove any
bubbles from the final product before it cures. After sufficient time passes, the pressure
is released from the container. And then, of course, she removes the new part from the
mold, being careful not to damage the mold since she will need to use it again since
she needs to make 4 of these parts. In fact, you can see she’s already made one and this
is the second one.
At this point there is some re-assembly to do.
As for the face, one big problem was the cracked plastic on the previous unit. She ended up
salvaging the front face cover from the other hearoid that she found.
As for those decals she removed, she printed some on her inkjet printer. Normally, she
would have gone down to Staples or some place like that to get higher quality prints done,
but since this was the middle of the pandemic, she just printed them at home. She used a
stick-on laminate much like I have used in the past when creating new labels for game
cartridges and stuff like that.
Although she did keep the original heroid logo since it was kind of shiny silver logo
and she didn’t feel she could duplicate that.
So, about that remote control missing the battery door. Unfortunately, the door from
the Omnibot almost fits, but not quite. You can see it sticks out way too far as the shape
of the remote is slightly different. So, she decided to mold her own battery door from
this one using a similar technique from the tie rods earlier.
However, part way through the process, she added some extra clay to this part here. The
purpose of this is to add some extra plastic in the final mold, which will make sense shortly.
Ok, so the mold is finished. Now it’s time to make the new part.
And here it is. It just needs a little clean up of the edges. But here’s where that extra
plastic comes into play. Because the part is now thicker, this gives her the opportunity
to cut some of the excess off, so that it better fits the Heroid remote control. And
after a little sanding you can see it fits perfectly. Other than the color is slightly
off, but I think we can overlook that!
As for the corroded battery terminals, Randi has her own special sauce for that. Actually,
it’s Lousiana Hot Sauce. She says it works well for removing corrosion. In fact, here
are the finished terminals after soaking in the hot sauce. So there you go. Now she can
solder these back in place and re-assemble the remote.
And here is the finished product. It’s not totally perfect. In fact, Randi and I discussed
trying to polish the face dome, but neither of us have positive experiences trying to
polish plastic and were afraid we’d make it worse. But I think it’s safe to say that
overall it is in much better shape than before!
I think the thing I’m most impressed with was how well her tie-rods came out. All 4
of these look as good as a factory piece. And of course the purpose behind these is
to keep the bottom part of the arm horizontal when the shoulder part is moved like this.
And they work perfectly. But yeah, even the finish on these feels like a factory part.
I’m really impressed with that!
The remote also came out pretty good. Even though this was never part of my original
Hearoid.
Anyway, let’s power this thing on for a moment. And now let’s just take it for a
little drive. Ok, so I never said it was fast. In fact, this thing is as slow as molasses.
I mean you saw how many reduction gears it had, right!
I thought I’d try playing a music cassette in here to see how it sounds, although I don’t
think that’s the primary purpose of the cassette deck. I’ll put in the Planet X3
soundtrack. I can tell it has a lot of wow and flutter just by listening to it. The speaker
sounds like a clock radio from the 80s. One neat thing is the mouth lights up in sync
with the music. Also all of the controls on the tape deck are soft-touch, which is kind
of neat.
One button I’m going to demonstrate on the remote is the talk button, this opens a voice
channel from the remote to the robot.
KILL ALL HUMANS! EXTERMINATE! So, the way this thing actually works is you can actually
move it around and when you push the buttons on here, most of the time it creates a tone,
not dissimilar to a DTMF tone for example. And the tone is transmitted the form of radio
waves over to the Hearoid. The Hearoid can record these tones to the cassette tape, that
way you are able to essentially record a set of actions for it to repeat. So, it doesn’t
really have any modern day tracking mechanisms, like it really doesn’t know where it is.
You could, you know, program it to move throughout a house using a preset programming technique,
but there’s no guarantee it’s going to make it through the second time because there
may be different obstacles in the way, or the traction of the wheels may not always
be exactly the same or whatever, but it’s still a pretty neat toy considering, you know,
when it came out. Now, it has two tracks on the tape because of course there’s left
and right heads because it’s a stereo cassette deck. But, when you’re recording from the
remote, one track is is used for the tones that control the robot, the other track is
used to record your voice. So, not only can it record you moving, but it records your
voice as well. So, again, pretty neat toy. I’d love to be able to do a little more
demonstration on it, but this video has been in progress for about 6 weeks now, so I think
it’s time to wrap it up. Maybe the next episode, we’ll cover it a little more in
depth from a technical standpoint on how it works. But for now, that’s all. I’m going
to give this back to Randi because I decided I don’t have room for it and Randi obviously
loves collecting them, so this is her robot now. So, I hope she enjoys it. And so, that
about wraps it up. So, thanks for watching!