Eve (Wall-E) Pendant

Details

Given some personal history with the movie, my goal here is to make a tasteful pendant of Eve (from the movie Wall-E) for my wife so she can wear it when we visit Disney theme parks.

Talking to her, I have figured out some criteria:

She has to want to wear it.
1. It has to evoke Eve's appearance for her. My prior design was too flat for this.
2. It has to be no larger (width, height, depth) than her compact astrolabe pendant.
The core effect is Eve's face, an OLED screen (to match the movie effect) that periodically plays an animation.
1. My original plan was to use a fast vibration sensor to randomly wake up and play an animation based on the wearer's movement.
The green leaf circle at some level of detail would be amazing.
Arms that can pop out would significantly offset other aesthetic shortcomings, like thickness or surface finish.
A smooth, glossy surface finish would be ideal.
At my current skill level, this will spend a lot of time on a shelf, so a storage-friendly battery solution is preferred.
I originally planned on a USB-rechargeable battery for ease of use during travel.
While I'd love to finally use the parts I have, to actually meet the size requirements and this will probably require new parts.
I don't yet know if moving the compute module to the back of the neck is feasible.

Project Logs

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Inspiration: GeekMomProjects' wearable battery holder
Jon Kunkee • 08/19/2023 at 03:33 • 0 comments

What got me back onto this project was GeekMomProjects' wearable battery holder:

https://www.geekmomprojects.com/flexible-3d-printed-battery-holder/

It takes about half the bulk of the pendant out and puts it on the necklace, which goes a long way towards meeting the stringent size requirements mentioned in the previous post.

(and now I can close that tab and come back to it from here)
Getting Started
Jon Kunkee • 08/11/2023 at 05:04 • 0 comments

Let's start by taking stock of where I'm at and where I've been.
I took a screencap from the movie, popped it into a 3-D CAD program, traced the shape, and attempted to extrude it and carve it to make it something that would fit the Adafruit parts I bought when neatly stacked while also resembling Eve.
The design I came up with ended up with a couple of zero-width walls. A kind acquaintance offered to help me machine it out of a block of plastic I acquired, but the 1.5" throw 1/16" mill bit we were using snapped before we finished. My various 3-D printing attempts failed because slicing and the aforementioned zero-width walls.
I once thought I could stack components together in the pocket with little to no thought for how to wire them together, but, well, I was very wrong--especially given the thicker wire I had on hand and the number of wires needed to connect the screen.
I even made little 3-D models of each to subtract from the overall shell design, but that didn't leave any room for wiring. Further, due to Eve's head's shape, I think I'll have to clip the corners of the OLED's glass sheet to get it to both fill the face area and stay within the head.
I have little software to speak of, but software is one of my strengths (animation less so, but I've learned some patterns recently that help).