12th Doctor's 2nd Sonic

Here's a load of info about how I made a replica of this sonic. Features... * 3D printed parts (not my original design, but modded) * sanded for 4.5 billion years and painted * contains an Arduino Pro Mini processor + FLORA 9dof Accelerometer / Gyro / compass board * Five RGB 'NeoPixel' LEDs on a tiny custom PCB (Red Mode - yay!) * Little amplifier to drive an 8-ohm speaker on 2nd PCB (also includes 3v regulator for the Accelerometer) * Custom software to handle effects and sound generation + Light effects with full RGB and nice fading + Sonic sounds generated by Direct Digital Syntheses (ooh!) + 'wav' audio playback for other sonic sounds + Synthesised playing of Dr. Who theme melody + Uses Accelerometer to detect gestures for effect changes also alters sonic sound effects according to angle + Magnetometer triggers sound/light effects (TODO) + Compass mode: pip... pip... pipipipip, that's North! (TODO) + Ooo-Eee-ooo mode: wave it for theramin-like music (hmm, maybe) Mk I. 19th Dec 2017 TonyWilk "mail at tonywilk dot co dot uk"

No, this one isn't mine

Building a Sonic

my sonic in dev. - yep, that really is 3D printed :)

Some of the elements of the build might be of interest for other projects:
The 3D printer model
Audio amplifier design and PCB
NeoPixel LED PCB
Arduino software
- sound generation (while driving NeoPixels !!)
- Accelerometer routines
- etc.

General Notes

• Had to modify the original 3d model to get the electronics to fit.
  - it is still a really tight fit!
• Used an Arduino Nano Pro ('Pro mini')- that's a version of the Nano without the USB on board
• that means you have to use a USB interface to program the device.
• The code is written for this hardware only 'cos it used interrupts and stuff
• Made a custom pcb for a single-transistor speaker amplifier and a 3v regulator for the 9dof
• Uses a tiny 'FLORA 9-DOF' accelerometer board
• The FLORA sensor I used was nice and small but needed 3V
  - looking today (May 2022) you could use this: Adafruit LSM9DS0 which uses the same device but can run on 5v
• I also made a tiny PCB to mount the RGB LEDs - tho you could hard-wire them
• If I built it again I'd resin-print all the parts and make it slightly larger (by say 5%)

Build Pictures

There's a bunch of build pictures on this page

3d Print

Original 3D design at Thingiverse:
12th Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver by Shipbrook
Modifications by me:

STL files:

Arduino code

I'm afraid the code is none too tidy - I messed about with it until it all worked and never got around to cleaning it all up.

The 5 RGB NeoPixels are driven from bit 4 of PORTD 'D4' (see Arduino_Pro_Mini_schematic.pdf)
PWM audio is output on pin 9 (D5), samples are output by an interrupt routine which has some complications !
(there are some notes in the code)
I hacked about an interface for the LSM9DS0 sensor accel.h and accel.cpp which are in the TW_LSM9DS0 subdirectory.
I think I put this directory in Arduino/libraries for it to compile with the .ino sketch.
There's commented-out code at the bottom of sonic12.ino that I used to generate the colour palette used for driving the LEDS.
The code wrote this page: colour_palette.html ahowing the indexes and RGB values.
Note: I've retrieved all this lot from my backup server so I hope it's all complete
(it was developed on a now long-dead Windows XP machine I seem to remember)
If you think there's anything missing, drop me a line at: mail at tonywilk dot co dot uk

The whole code is in this sonic12.zip file

PCB designs

Audio amp + regulator schematic

The "sonicLEDS" pcb was a right pain, probably easier just to hard-wire them in place
and you would save space without the PCB


The end.

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