My Protogen Semi-robot Powered by LattePanda Alpha

**This article was originally written by William. All rights belong to the original author.

Introduction of my project

My project started in 2019 and is still ongoing, it is a Protogen which is a species from the Furry Fandom, let's say it is a cosplay of a semi-robot with a Daft Punk-like visor with lights/animation, quite a cool design, and project to sink all my money in ahah.

My character is a Protogen and usually everyone just uses an LED matrix like a P3 but I wanted to make something revolutionary with flexible OLED and all, plenty of captor, and being able to game or stream my Nintendo Switch on a wall.

This Protogen required 6 HDMI outputs to power 5x 1080p60 flexible OLED 7inch screens and 2 round 400p60 flexible OLED screens that run on a single HDMI, and 6 video outputs which no computer small enough to fit in my helmet existed, tried with an RPI4B as a master and 6 RPI zero wh as a slave with each a copy of the data but it failed because Chatgpt didn't exist and I sucked at codding this system so I scrapped it and needed an x86 windows based micro-computed that also have GPIO like the RPI, found multiple computers but sticked to the Lattepanda Alpha 864s because it was small, had 1HDMI and 1USBC DisplayPort, I only required 4 more HDMI output which could be solved by adding a GPU (gt710-4h-sl-2gd5) on the Nvme 4x port with an NVMe to PCIe converter.

Part of the hardware:

Tutorials (steps) of making this project

Well, a tutorial might be impossible due to the cost but if you wanna try you'll need quite the budget and knowledge and time... and 3D modeling skills, and coding, and soldering, and...

Yeah so to make it simple, 3D model or import a human model or here you can also 3D scan yourself with a company that does that, measure yourself and size the human, download Fusion 360 its free, and design the visor first, once the visor is made make the rest of the design as you wish, make sure to add 2cm on the side for a foam pad, by experience you will forget that you got ears so take that into account lol because I know I made that mistake, don't forget that you need to put it on so the hole need to fit your head...

3D print it in PETG because PLA will soften under the sun and ABS is a pain to print but also gets dissolved by any paint you will apply to it, sand it, apply coats of automotive body filler and spray filler.

For the visor you'll need to vacuum from a 2mm PETG sheet with whatever source of heat you find on your way lol and a vacuum, I did it with a barbecue because it doesn't fit my oven, make a stupid wood box with a hole for the vacuum and drill holes on top to suck air.

Do a rough cut of the visor and plunge inside a giant pot full of hot water with a Black tint from iDye Poly.

For the rest paint it, now the fun part since the stock GPU and Lattepanda won't fit on the design you will have to 3D design a new aluminum block with a hole for a heat pipe that will go to a centralized cooling system, thanks to the 2020s regular joe can order that metal part for cheap on JLCPCB or others.

Put a heavy dose of thermal paste and secure all PCB parts with Kapton tape to insulate them.

GPU can be powered with some simple 12V buck converter, I know right, all these giant PSUs taking so much space can be replaced by a tiny PCB, and it works like wow wtf how??

https://x.com/Dragirek/status/1730779568959586734

Have fun adding a hidden video projector, a 4 USB A hub, or even moveable ears, be crazy, be happy, sink all your money @w@, play Doom Eternal on a wall with the onboard GPU at a convention, impress your cosplayer friend playing VRchat ahah.

OR you could just follow a really old tutorial I made a long time ago, like really long ago

https://youtu.be/32KSqjQapcE?si=uFoMbxlUuLQz5YyW

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