Facebot is a cute desktop robot that features a small 8x8 LED Display matrix. It is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which means we can control this robot using Wifi and/or Bluetooth.

The 8x8 LED Matrix I2C display is useful for scrolling text, and displaying fun icons and simple animations.

Bill of Materials

MicroPython Code

The code for Facebot is available in the Pico SMARS 2 library:

https://www.github.com/kevinmcaleer/picosmars2

The library contains the icon images as well as a 5x5 font named ‘Jonny Five’.

Icon Maker

A useful tool for creating your own icons is available with this library - a program called icon_maker.py will help you create icons for displaying on your 8x8 Matrix LED screen.

To use the icon maker you will need to setup a virtual environment with the tk library installed:

1. From the command line type:

    python3 -m venv venv
   

2. Activate the virtual environment:

    source venv/bin/activate
   

3. Install tk:

    pip install tk
   

4. Run icon_maker:

   python3 icon_maker.py
   

Wiring

STL Files

Facebot is made up of 3 parts:

• body.stl - The main Body
• left_leg.stl - The left leg
• right_leg.stl - The right leg

Construction