Pokemon Stage

Welcome to my Instructable!

My interest in Pokemon began at a very young age. I remember watching the show every Saturday and waiting eagerly for the next. This creation is part of my "Make Art Project" for Professor Gallaugher's course titled "Physical Computing" at Boston College.

This project includes 3D printing, woodcutting, silicone, mini green grass, an LED strip, a servo motor, an external speaker, an Circuit Playground Bluefruit, wires, hot glue, spray adhesive, and cotton balls.

I included 3D prints of a Pokeball and five original Pokemon (Pikachu, Squirtle, Charmander, Bulbasaur, and Eevee). All 3D prints were printed on Prusa Mini 3D printers.

I hope you enjoy making this build. I will be providing the code, as well as, a step-by-step guide on how to build it. This project was programmed with CircuitPython, using Mu IDE.

Thank you for your interest in this Pokemon Stage!

3D printing, woodcutting, silicone, mini green grass, an LED strip, a servo motor, an external speaker, an Circuit Playground Bluefruit, alligator clip wires (3), a battery pack, hot glue, spray adhesive, glue stick, cotton balls, black acrylic paint, and a paintbrush

Pokeball (3D Print)

I can't take the credit for the 3D print designs. Luckily, I was able to use a design made by Intentional3D on Thingverse.com. This 3D design includes a button release for the Pokeball. All these designs were downloaded as SVL files and configured on the Prusa Slicer Software. The design had the top half, bottom half, two loops, a button, and a stand for the Pokeball.

The base of the Pokeball I designed myself, using the design software Tinkercad. I used a cylinder to make the object and a much smaller cylinder to make a hole to have space for my wires which are inside the Pokeball.

Instruction to Assemble Pokeboll (by Intentional3D):

You will need:

1. All 6 printed parts super glue
2. A small spring ~1.75 cm long (you can find these in ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils)
3. Sandpaper
4. An extra piece of 1.75 mm thick filament ~2.75 cm long.
5. Follow this link for a video on how to assemble the Pokeball http://youtu.be/jvgK3_UdLdg.

We printed all of the parts using a 0.2 mm layer height and 10% infill. We used support material for all of the parts. Make sure that you carefully remove all of the support material and sand down the rim of the lid (this is important to get the lid to lock correctly). Make sure to remove the support material from the 3 grooves on the rim of the bottom of the Pokeball as well. It is also a good idea to make sure that the whole assembly works properly before gluing the parts together.

Pokemon 3D print

Each individual Pokemon had to be printed out separately, but all on the same 3D printer. Like the Pokeball print, I do not take credit for designing these prints. All credit goes to Agustin Flowalistik on thingverse.com.

Prusa Slicer software was used to configure the designs and prep them for printing on the Prusa Mini 3D printer. I decided to print them all in the same color filament, but feel free to use different colors for each Pokemon.

Where To Connect What!

On the CPB board, the LED strip the RED alligator clip gets connected to VOUT, the WHITE alligator clip to signal A1, and the BLACK alligator clip to GND.

The servo motor required an extension that provided it with alligator clips to attach it to the CPB. The BROWN cable goes to GND, the ORANGE goes to the TX and RED to the VOUT.

The external speaker gets attached with one alligator clip to the tip of the audio cable and another to the base. The other end of the cables goes on the board to GND and AUDIO.

One final alligator clip gets attached to A2 on the board and hangs from the Pokeball to trigger different animations and sounds.

Where It All Goes!

The CPB board sits nicely within the hollow Pokeball acting as a great housing unit for the technology. I drilled a hole underneath the Pokeball to slide through the external technology and wires I would be used to tidy up the project. I also drilled a hole on the stand to push the wires through there. \Within the hollow cylinder at the bottom sits a servo motor with an arrow cut out from printing paper. This is what acts as the random selector of each Pokemon sitting at the front of the wooden board. I used an external speaker to amplify the sound of each Pokemon because the volume on the board itself was too low.

How to make it work?

I created a Github repository that contains the code for this project: Github.com

There you will find the code with all the animations, speaker, and servo functions. Also, how to use the LED strip included in the project.

The audio for each of the pokemon comes from downloading a youtube video, converting it to MP3, and then using the Audacity Software to format and convert the MP3 to a WAV file. Finally, I stored each WAV file into the Circuit Playground board.

Feel free to use the code, tweak it, or create your own project. There are many other things that can be done with this code to make the stage do various functions.

Let's Assemble It!

1. I cut out a 10x15 in the wooden board where the whole project would sit.
2. Then I painted the wood with black acrylic paint
3. I sprinkled some mini grass towards the front of the board and sprayed some adhesive.
4. Glue the pokemon each lined up at the front of the board facing forward
5. Lay down some silicone right behind the Pokemon and glue some spread-out cotton balls on top.
6. Under the silicone will go the LED strip lighting up the Pokemon Stage.
7. In the middle of the board, hot glue the cylinder base and feed the wires from the Pokeball through it even the LED strip
8. The speaker that is attached to the CPB board will go under the base, and under the silicone, right next to the cylinder base.
9. Then we hot glue the Pokeball to the stand that we printed with it and hot glue the stand to the cylinder base with some space towards the front for the servo motor (which is hot glued to the back of the front of the cylinder base. As seen on the picture)

Thank You For Taking a Look and Trying Out My Project!