Introduction: DIY PIXAR's AUTO

About: "Almost Toast"
Even though it's fairly unlikely I will be posting a step by step Instructable on him I figured, what with National Robot Week, I could still share a couple of photos of one of my earliest PIXAR builds the villainous Autopilot from WALL·E.  

Back in the spring of 2009, when I was the Public Representative of the wall-ebuilders.com group, we were getting ready for our very first Maker Faire event and I needed something really cool to show off who we were.  While I was a bit pressed for time to build a WALL-E, I was very influenced by a video I saw of another WALL-E builder on youtube who painted a captain's wheel to look like film's villain and was inspired to build my own (with the added modifications of course).

Basically he's a modified wooden ship's helm I purchased at Michael's craft store which I repainted and sanded down for movie accuracy.  His eye is the glass and metal frame from a clock and behind it I set a super bright red LED (inspired by this 'ible).  Additionally all five of his... ship "pegs" can be fully extended to a length of 2" and he's fully equipped with a grabber claw and faux tazer (like the film's).  But perhaps the coolest function is that I also built into him a remote control speaker which I use to control his voice from a MacinTalk enabled computer, giving him that awesome dark monotone voice from the film.

He's been a staple of my booth at both the Maker Faire 2009 and 2010 and here's hoping we get to show off our new creations at Maker Faire 2011!

-M.E.