Separating Robie's head from his body was a lot easier than I anticipated. If I remember correctly there were 4 screws holding the back section to the front. No guillotine was required. The existing LED's, ultrasonic mic's and push button were all attached with jst-type connectors.
My plan was to replace Robie's eyes with ws2812 programable LED's. Adafruit's NeoPixel Jewel 7's fit the bill nicely. Basically it's 7 ws2812's laid out on a circular PCB. The ws2812's are controllable from the Raspi using Jeremy Garff's excellent library. So all I have to do is write some simple Python statements and I can make the LED's do my bidding.
Soldering and mounting of the LED's went better than I expected. It actually looks quite professional (if you ask me). NeoPixel modules are daisy-chained together. So there are only 3 wires leading in to the eyes (+5v, GND and GPIO in). I had to do away with the red lense (otherwise I would be limited to a red color like the original Robie). But I quite like the look of the clear eyes. The NeoPixel modules were epoxied in place and left to dry over night.
Here's a shot of the eyes fully assembled and connected up to the Raspberry Pi. The camera work strategically omits the massive pile of electronic parts sitting just out of sight ;-) Each of the 14 individual Neo Pixels is now individually controllable!
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