VST – Television Buzz Lightyear First Version
What would happen when an old robot from the fifties would be mixed up with a modern robot, a robot that my son plays with….Well, I know that buzz lightyear is not really a robot, its an astronaut in a robot suit but anyway…. I wondered what would happen if old and new were thrown in the mix.

I found recently a very nice Alps Television Spaceman in Italy. The robot was not working anymore, missing antenna, dome, an eye but the robot was almost perfect, clean battery compartment and never been opened or messed with before…The PERFECT candidate for this project. I made some drawings for this project a year ago but never found the perfect robot to mix with Buzz. Looking at this television spaceman filled up the gaps and in a split second I saw the combination.. the hands, would fit, the head… possible….antenna, I had a repro one…could be done. That same afternoon I grabbed a “fresh” Buzz Lightyear from the shelves and started to take it fully apart.

First thing I had in hand was buzz his hand. In a minute it had it fit perfectly into the Alps arm… perfect fit 🙂 the Lightyear wing pack… would fit together with the battery cover from the robot. I started to take it all apart and saved the microprocessor that drives buzz talking, laser and sound. I remade the print and made it fit into the remains of the robots head, it fit there perfectly. Then I cut buzz his head into 2 parts and installed a bulb to light the head and mounted it on the litho part of the robots head. The robots movie mechanism was damaged and I decided to make it a static movie. The head part had to make place for modern technique so I installed a “knight rider” led part in there.

Buzz has 3 buttons to control his features so I had to think to bring back these buttons. because the robot was missing his antenna the first red switch had to be ON/OFF. The middle switch controls the Led lights and the left blue switch controls buzz his “laser” that is build in his arm.

A reproduction antenna controls the speech mechanism. Just a touch to the antenna is enough to get buzz talking. The legs were taken apart to repaint the feet with buzz lightyears colors and I repainted the litho at the front as well and tried to make a perfect mix between old and new, robot and buzz. I even was able to use buzz his original vizer and mounted it on the robots head. It can open and close when the antenna is removed. The antenna is attached to the robot with the original chain.

Because I added so many extra functions to the alps robot i bumped into 2 major problems: first I wanted the robot to run on the 2 original D-cell batteries. Not a problem for the robot but the Buzz chip runs on 4.5 volt and the leds on 9 volt. Still I did not wanted to add extra batteries so I made the wires so that it could all run on the 2 D-Cell batteries, 3 volt 🙂 By adding some extra electronica, I was able to have all the functions work on 3 volt, 2 D-Cells.

The biggest problem were all those wires… from the chip, the leds, the robot itself, laser, sound, speaker, extra lights, switches etc etc..It drove me crazy because there is not much extra space in the robots body. I think It took me more than 3 days to figure out how to fit all those wires into the robots body and so that they would not get loose and could be damaged by the robots walking and movie mechanism. I had to recalculate the wires scheme 3 times before I could make it work and that it would fit into the robots body.

The Robot has the following functions / features:

Walking action.
Static Spacemovie with light.
Swinging arms
Laser with Sound in left arm (blue switch )
Led light action with on/off switch ( green switch )
On / Off ( red switch )
Talking action ( 12 phrases )
Opening and closing Vizer
Lighted Face

The result is amazing: a perfect mix between new and old: Alps Television Spaceman meets Buzz Lightyear.

VST 1006 Television Buzz Lightyear is an unique design and its the only example made. Unique: 1 out of 1 !
This robot comes with an original certificate.

CFP: Contact me For Price   at    boogo.nl@gmail.com