The Atomic-Powered Robot

This is my mechanical baby, Tommy. He's an atomic-powered [sic] robot that can talk and walk around the room. Born in 1984, he's been with me since the early 1990s, but for the last ten years he's been quite ill and not able to talk.

Today I finally fixed him. While doing that, I decided to do a full autopsy for the sake of science, as I've found his vocal cords especially intriguing. So please observe: Tommy's internals. (As with all medical imagery, it's not for the faint of heart.)

Tommy's belly is dominated by a pink-colored contraption that looks like it has a speaker on the front. The pink device gives Tommy his ability to utter the words "I am the atomic powered robot. Please give my best wishes to everybody!" and also make the sound of a laser gun. Below the sound player is the walking motor, which is quite simple and I'm not going to concentrate on it.

Removing the cover of the pink device, we see a large funnel-shaped object that looks a bit like a speaker. It has a tense plastic membrane, like a drumhead.

Now it gets really interesting. The speaker is resting on a tiny gramophone arm, which is playing a little vinyl record! There's even a simple electro-mechanical end-of-disc detection and arm-return mechanism. The vibrations of the needle are mechanically transferred to the speaker membrane; there's no electric amplification of any kind.

Could a gramophone record get any cuter?

And here's Tommy sending you his best wishes.

UPDATE: Okay, yeah, he's cute and all. But take another look at the above photo of the record. Don't you think it contains a lot of information about the recording? Perhaps you could even extract the audio from a good enough photograph. Just a silly thought.

Well, let's get to it.

First I'll need a good quality picture of the record's surface. My roommate lended me her expensive camera for this purpose. To get the rough surface evenly exposed, I used an exposure time of 10 seconds with an aperture of f/32. I circled a lamp around the record for 10 seconds and got this cool image.

I'll hint the positions of the groove at every turn and then let Perl interpolate a smooth spiral:

I'm going to read the record along the spiral at 360 RPM and just convert the pixel brightness at every point of the groove into PCM amplitude. This will probably result in something audible, although quite noisy. There appears to be two interleaved grooves: one for the speech, one for the laser sound. The groove gets randomly selected when the robot's head button is pressed, depending on where the needle happens to land. So I made a stereo sound file.

It's very noisy indeed and there's a lot of crosstalk, but something can be heard in the background. After edge detection on the image and some noise removal on the audio:

Update: Further studying of the record and better sound samples in "The laser-equipped Lego train".