My name is Romanadvoratrelundar.
I’m so sorry about that, is there anything we can do?
K9 was a robotic dog who was the doctor’s friend and mobile computer.
Introduced to the series in 1977, He could do everything from medical scanning to, you
know, attacking the occasional guard.
And while he was most commonly seen along side Tom Baker, he did make an appearance
along side David Tennant in 2006.
Goodbye old friend.
Goodbye Master.
Alright, so the first thing I want to do is I want to show you this officially licensed
K9 toy that my wife bought this for me for Christmas last year.
It’s pretty neat, let me show you how this thing works.
First you’ll need to power it on.
In order to do that, you must remove the side panel, then there is a power switch hidden
right here.
This unit at 100% efficiency, this unit identified as K9 mark II.
The remote control operates the wheels, but it drives essentially like a tank.
One control operates one wheel, and the other control operates the other wheel.
So, when you’re driving the thing you must press both controls forward to move him forward.
Same goes for backwards.
If you want to turn, then you do like this.
Driving K9 in a straight line is easy, but trying to make elegant turns is almost impossible.
The remote also has some other interesting features.
For example, many of these buttons will cause K9 to say different phrases.
Engaging pursuit mode.
But some buttons, like scanning now will also cause the ear antennas to move.
Scanning now.
This button will control the blaster, making it extend, then another press to make it retract.
The other pets in the house don’t seem to get along with K9 at all.
In fact, my cat is terrified of it.
Ironically, so is the dog.
But today, it’s time for my mini K9 to meet the life-sized version.
The size difference is actually quite surprising!
OK, and this is Fitz Walker, and he is from the Houston area and he runs the youtube channel
called Hobby View, and he has come all the way up here to the Dallas area to let me see
his full sized K9 replica.
And his K9 puts my K9 to shame.
So, what inspired you to build this full sized replica?
Well, I like to build things, I like to tinker with things.
It’s kind of my hobby.
And, I’ve always been a fan of the old Doctor Who show from back in the eighties and seventies.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, as a kid I watched them off of PBS and despite not really liking them at first, I’ve
come to where I really love and enjoy them.
Of course, one of the most beloved companions was K9 from the Tom Baker era.
And, I’ve always liked the character and as I grew up into an adult, I started playing
with electronics and that kind of stuff, I started thinking you know it would be really
neat to make my own K9.
And what really caused me to kind of jump into the project was that I found a set of
plans for the body online.
I think they were made by a gentleman named Dave Everett out of Australia.
And, once I found those, I just couldn’t resist.
One Christmas holiday, I just started hacking away in my workshop and the next thing I know,
I’ve got a K9.
Awesome.
It’s surprising how big it is in person, too.
Because, having never seen the real thing, only seeing toys like this, I mean, I always
knew this was small but I never realized how much bigger the real prop is.
It’s a big lug.
He’s pretty heavy too.
Fortunately, they put handles on him which is part of the actual prop.
And I think I know why because I imagine the real one was heavy too, and all of the actors
carrying this thing around.
So, it’s pretty big.
I was kind of surprised too when I started putting it together.
I had to special order sheets of plastic just to get something big enough to build him out
of.
But it’s been a great project, it’s been a lot of fun tinkering with him.
Implementing all kinds of neat little gadgets and features into him.
OK, so like the actual television prop, I wanted to duplicate as much as I could on
what my model could do versus what the show prop could do.
So, I wanted to duplicate all of the things he could do just like in the show.
And of course, one of the iconic things is his ears.
So, move his ears back and forth.
You can even set different positions.
He’s got the antenna probe that comes out.
So that he can probe for alien lifeforms.
So, we have the tail here, which I can swing up and down which you see a lot of the time
in the show.
He also can move left in right.
So this is always great to see the reaction of people as he waggles his tail like a real
dog.
Now only that, I figured.
It’s a dog, right?
And what do people like to do with dogs?
They like to pet their dogs.
So there’s actually touch sensors on the body so that when I touch it, it will wiggle
his tail, in the front and the rear, on the body, and also in the head.
If you touch his head, the ears will wiggle.
And if you’re really good and he really likes you, you can touch him on this special
spot under the chin, and he’s ears will also wiggle.
And of course the head also moves up and down.
Just like in the show.
I can move him down, move him up a little bit, move him all the way up.
So, he can even nod his head a little bit.
And of course, just like in the show, he’s got his laser gun.
Which, it’s retractable so it comes out.
It does move up and down for maximum fire defense.
And not only that, it has lights and sound.
And the kids love that!
And if you notice the eyes light up whenever I use the laser gun sound.
Or, he also talks.
Affirmative.
I am K9 the doctor’s faithful friend.
So one of the things you notice in the show is that he has a little ticker tape printer
in the mouth.
And, I always liked that.
Thought that was a neat idea.
And so, I went a little step further with that, in that it’s an actual thermal printer
in the mouth.
And I can feed out paper so he has a little tongue.
And not only that, he can, there’s a camera in the face.
There’s actually two cameras.
But one of the cameras is hooked up so he can actually take pictures and print them
out.
Where do I need to go?
Look him in his face.
OK, that’s a good instragice?
Hold still.
OK.
There you go.
Identified you as a squirrel.
Didn’t know you had it in you.
So, just like in the show, he’s got a little TV monitor in the side.
It doesn’t seem to have been used very much on the TV show, but there are a few scenes
where it was working.
So, I thought wow, it’d be really nice to have an actual monitor that does show something.
So, I have a raspberry pi hooked up to a converted back seat car television LCD screen and it
can play videos, it can play games, and all kinds of stuff.
So, I like to put on little patterns to show people that it’s actually doing something
and it always gets some really neat comments from people when they see that.
So, for display on the screen, I usually just use a whole bunch of videos that I pulled
off of YouTube and other sources.
So, it will sequence through a good dozen or so videos, so it will run for a good almost
an hour just showing different videos.
What is the Doctor Who Commodore 64?
There’s a doctor.
I saw this.
I thought this was pretty neat, It has sound on the actual ROM so it kind of loses it’s
grandeur without the sound, but it’s basically a Commodore 64 screen showing Doctor Who,
the Tardis, and a few other things.
I thought it looked very retro looking and this is 8-Bit right?
I’m actually familiar with that demo.
I used to play that as a kid on my Commodore 64.
So, I saw that.
I also have an option of running an actual Commodore 64 emulator on here.
And what I would do is I would load the emulator and then load one of the more recent Commodore
64 demos, which are beautiful and it would just cycle through showing this very interesting
screen from the demoscene, if you’ve ever seen those on the Commodore 64 forums or what
not.
Of course, one of the key parts of K9 is the control panel.
And I actually spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to implement my own personal
flavor to the show’s design.
Of course, one of the iconic parts of the control panel is the multi color keys that
kind of blink and lights.
And it also, I noticed in the show, it had these two square screens.
You never see anything on them, but I thought that would be perfect to have some sort of
little display screens.
So, one of the first things, of course, I tackled was the lights.
I found some switches off of eBay that look reasonably close to what they actually used
on the show.
Of course the show is some 40 years ago so finding exact types of switches is a really
daunting task.
So, I figured this is good enough for replica purposes.
And I have an Arduino dedicated just for blinking the lights.
And, of course, one of the first questions I get is do the keys do anything?
And the answer is, yes!
Not all of them work, of course, but I have some features that I hooked up to some of
the buttons.
One of them is, I can actually change the light pattern by pressing that button there.
So, I’ve got a fast pattern and a slow pattern.
And these patterns are random.
I also have a button that will basically make the ears and tail wiggle automatically every
30 seconds or so, which is good for when he’s driving around and I don’t feel like pressing
a lot of buttons.
I have another button.
If I press that, he will talk every couple of minutes.
I press this, he will talk every 30 seconds, roughly.
And one last thing is I noticed at conventions I take him to quite often, I noticed that
kids would come up and start waving their hand in front of his face.
I thought, well that’s interesting they must want to see if he responds.
So, by pressing this button, now, if you wave your hand in front of his face, hello, he
says hello.
hello.
And the last thing is these two screens.
And, as soon as I saw these, I knew I had to have them display something.
And so, with the help of another Arduino, I have actually LCD screens, little tiny 2.2
inch ones, that display system status.
So right now, it’s actually showing the power level and the voltage out of the main
battery pack.
Then, this other one is something I just added kind of recently.
So, at the moment it’s not really displaying anything of useful data, just sort of a busy
pattern I thought looked really neat.
But at some point I will have it display other types of information.
K-9’s construction is actually pretty simple.
I used eighth inch or 3mm thick polystyrene plastic sheet for most of the body.
Templates for the pieces were first tack glued onto the plastic.
Using a scribing tool, all the parts were carefully cut out.
Then glued together using a special liquid glue that melts a small layer of the plastic
together to form a strong bond.
This glue dries very quickly so the construction process is pretty fast.
Once the body and head were mostly done, I then moved onto installing the internal mechanics
like this re-purposed motorized car antenna which will become the retractable probe.
Next, were other parts like the servos for the nose gun and ears, and a thermal receipt
printer for the mouth.
With the majority of the animatronics installed, I just had to give everything a test run.
Most of the controls are done by a model airplane controller.
The drive system consists of a pair of kid’s surplus scooter motors with free castoring
wheels in the rear.
So it's basically a tank drive setup.
The control panel was one of the last major pieces to be built and was the first part
I used an Arduino on.
All 12 outputs of the Arduino are used to flash the lights on the switches.
So I needed to make a transistor switching board as the Arduino could not power the lights
directly.
For K-9 to talk, a dedicated mp3 player is connected to a 15 function remote control.
The sound samples were found either online or sampled directly from the show.
Its a good thing they didn't use much music on the old series.
Capacitive touch sensors like you see here are mounted in several locations underneath
the body.
When triggered, they send a signal to an Arduino to activate servos to move the ears and tail.
Most of K9 was built over a 5 month period.
You know, I would love to get some reactions from real life people seeing this K9 prop.
And, I think we need to go somewhere full of nerds.
And I know just the place we can go.
So, I took Fitz and K9 to Dallas Makerspace where they host the DFW Retro Computing Meetup.
We have this meet up a few times a year and you never know what you’re going to find
there.
Everybody brings a vintage computer of some kind, and you’ll rarely see the same computer
show up twice.
But I don’t think anyone was expecting to see K9 show up.
Unfortunately, his onboard wireless camera had succumb to some interference in the building.
And here was our grand entrance.
Oh No!
It’s K9!
It’s even got the scarf!
Oh Yeah!
K9 was certainly a hit, everyone wanted to have a look, even those that were not familiar
with classic Doctor Who.
And Fitz was right, kids love him!
Well, that about wraps it up for K9 and I want a give out a big thanks to Fitz for bringing
over his replica and letting me see it.
I also wanted to mention that Planet X2, you know the game I’ve been working on all of
2017 is now finished and it is available for sale.
There are two links down in the description.
One link is for customers who are in Europe.
And the other link is for my web store, which is for the USA and pretty much anywhere else
in the world.
So, Australia, Brazil, wherever you happen to be.
I would mention I have these in stock ready to ship out today.
The ones in Europe are not quite ready, there’s going to be a two or three day delay on getting
those shipped out, but he is taking orders and you’ll get the digital download today
if you buy it today, so I just thought I’d mention that and I will be doing a full episode
on this game in a few weeks.
So stick around for that, and thanks for watching!