Infineon is one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, but the company is made up of regular people like any other. Many of those people just happen to be engineers and they like to build gadgets and gizmos like the rest of us. Following a water cooler discussion about who had the biggest 3D printer, the Infineon team decided to create this delightful XXL Chatbot to offer yuletide greetings.

The adorable robot was designed after the Infineon Chatbot avatar that offers virtual assistance on the Infineon website. While that internet Chatbot can respond to natural language questions, this XXL Chatbot can only emote through its animated eyes and chest-mounted RGB LED matrix. The team 3D-printed the robot’s body in several sections on a Creality Ender-5 Plus and the assembled figure is quite large, hence the “XXL” designation.

They animated the eyes using two custom PCBs, each of which has a diameter of 60mm and contains 101 SK6812MINI individually addressable RGB LEDs. They controlled those with a pair of Infineon XMC2GO microcontroller development boards. The chest display is a flexible 64×32 RGB LED matrix from Adafruit, which conforms to the cylindrical curve of the robot’s torso. They controlled that LED matrix with an Arduino Mega 2560 board through Adafruit’s RGB Matrix Shield. It displays a Christmas tree animation derived from z1co’s animation set for 32×32 matrices.

The result is a cheerful and adorable robot that fits perfectly with the holiday season!