Arduino Powered Knife-Wielding Tentacle Will Leave You In Stitches

Writing articles for Hackaday, we see funny projects, and we see dangerous projects. It’s rare to find a project which combines the two. This one somehow manages to pull it off. [Outaspaceman] is familiar with LittleBits, but he’s just starting to learn Arduino programming. He completed the blink tutorial, but blinking an LED just wasn’t enough fanfare for the success of his first Arduino program. He connected the Arduino Mega’s LED output to a pair of LittleBits which then switch a servo between two positions. A bare servo wouldn’t be much fun, so [Outaspaceman] connected a tentacle and a small Swiss army knife. Yes, a knife.

The tentacle in question is designed to be a finger puppet. There’s something about a tentacle waving a knife around that is so hilarious and absurd that we couldn’t help but laugh. We’re not alone apparently, as this video has gone viral with over 1 million views. It’s almost like a violent revenge of the most useless machine. For the technically curious, the tentacle’s seemingly random motion is analogous to that of the double pendulum.

Our readers will be happy to know that [Outaspaceman] has made it to the Arduino servo tutorial, and is now controlling the servo directly, no LittleBits needed. We just hope he has a good way to turn his creation off – without the need for stitches.

31 thoughts on “Arduino Powered Knife-Wielding Tentacle Will Leave You In Stitches

  1. It’s all well and good until it let’s go of the knife and it flies in some random direction.
    A timer perhaps, power it with some half dead batteries or maybe just add a remote.
    Test it in a cage?
    Imagine if someone made a ten foot tall version of this…

    1. That was the first thing I noticed … “Gee, that’s a lot of bandaging.” Kind of reminds me of that scene in UHF when the shop teacher is discussing safety with a table saw and cuts off his finger.

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