A head mod is, for me, what enables you to give your robot an appearance of an actual personality, and I have one definate recommendation that I feel I must exhort you to do if you are doing a head mod - two multicolored 'eyes', powered from the PWM ports. I think the first post I saw on here about that (apologies to anon if I'm wrong) was hivemind in conjunction with bullit here, about the multicolored eyes hives robot has (and mine, too, now!), and a lot of the info you need is in that thread.
I did the same mod after seeing his video (but before his post), and it's relatively easy if you can use a soldering iron. I ordered pretty much the same tri-color LED as they did (and spares!! you need spares when you burn them out accidentally!! doh!), but with pins rather than SMD form, which made soldering easier for me. But, in my template code, I can now have red, blue, green, yellow or white eyes on demand. Everytime I switch him on, he chooses a random eye colour and sticks with it for that powered on session. He also blinks every few seconds when inactive; occasionally looks around left and right too, when inactive (a 'boredom' routine I added to my program a la Robosapien). His eyes go red with anger/embarassment when the tilt sensor kicks in and he automatically picks himself up from a fall. 'Disco' light flashes when he does something impressive or finishes his pornographic moves I use to impress my like-minded, very childish, friends. Simple things, but gives it tons of personality. Look at hives handspring movies and ask yourself how he could have expressed what a puss.....a coward his particular Robonova is without the head motion and eye colours!
Also, I find it great for debugging. I have a routine that 'flashes' out a number; a reading from, say, the tilt sensor. Blue flash per hundred, green flash per ten, red flash per single digit, so 231 is blue-blue-green-green-green-red. Also, he does a quick red or green flash when I toggle my gyro off and on, and also when I 'shift' up and down my controls on the remote between two different sets of control templates.
So, keep on with the small steps, and I look forward to MKII - with two eyes 
Oh, and finally, as an ex-pat Brit stuck in the US of A, it's great to see the word 'chuffed' now and again!Statistics: Posted by beermat — Wed Aug 23, 2006 1:47 am
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