There are scary robots and endearing robots. WALL-E is the second kind: a trash compactor left alone on Earth, collecting knick-knacks and falling in love. It was inevitable I’d build one sooner or later.
Tracks first
February 2020. You start from the bottom, with the tracks: link by link, wheels, tensioner. It’s the least poetic part of WALL-E and the most mechanical, the one that has to carry everything else.
A green WALL-E
Then the body and the eyes. Printed in whatever filament was in the house, i.e. acid green. For a few months my WALL-E was a sort of radioactive cousin of the original.
Motors and electronics
A WALL-E that doesn’t move is a sculpture. So, brushed gear motors for the tracks and wiring running inside the body up to the eyes. The electronics took the most time, and the most swallowed curses.
Just the right rust
December 2020: colour at last. WALL-E’s yellow isn’t a clean yellow: it’s a yellow that has spent seven hundred years in the sun, among dust and garbage. So yellow base, then rust, dirt, chipping and streaks, layer after layer, until the plastic looks like well-used sheet metal.
Finished? On the outside
3 January 2021. Metallic grey eyes, arms fitted, tracks dirty in just the right way. On the outside WALL-E looks finished. On the inside, not quite. I did test the track motors, sacrificing two motor shields along the way. Then the global semiconductor shortage hit and spare parts were impossible to find for months. I have the components now, but there’s still plenty to do: the board with all the wiring and the software that makes him move.
So WALL-E is officially hibernating. He sits on a workshop shelf waiting for his brain, collecting dust in the meantime, which for a trash compactor is the height of professional satisfaction.