Star Wars Droid Translating Helmets

Now how’s this for an expo costume? [AEInnovations] put together a set of Droid helmets that talk to each other in droid speak!

Before you get too excited, we have to let you know, they aren’t actually translating anything. One, there’s no such thing as a complete droid speak language from Star Wars, and two, it’d be ridiculous. No, what he’s created is a bit simpler, but nonetheless awesome and very clever.

The helmets have walkie talkies built in, so two people wearing the helmets can simply talk to each other, in plain old English — well, or maybe Klingon. But when you speak, a sensor in the helmet notices you speaking, and starts broadcasting a randomized droid speech for everyone else to hear.

The result is a surprisingly convincing droid conversation. Just take a listen!

As far as Star Wars themed projects go, we love the idea behind a full-size Holochess board — we just need someone to try doing it with real holograms!

[via Hackster]

15 thoughts on “Star Wars Droid Translating Helmets

  1. Of course, if you really want to mess around with someone, have a party with them t, give everyone but one person walkie talkies quietly wired up so they can understand what they’re saying, and then leave the person to go mad trying to figure out why everyone but them can understand the wierd beeps an bloops that the droids are saying. You’d have to hide the walkie talkies pretty well, though; It’d probably be easier done with pound-shop autoscan radios and a low-power transmitter.
    On other notes, cool project; I feel it’d be a little cooler, though, if the actual speech was encoded in some way into the bleeps. It’d be hard to do with encoded audio, but you might be able to pass it as text and run speech-to-text and text-to-speech on a raspberry pi or smartphone.

    1. already have a translator! DROTR Calls&Chat translation https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tiwlab.droidtranslator&hl=en
      The video calls with translation “voice in voice” in real time! In addition, you will be able to speak, to see and hear each other on native language!
      – Chat with the translation and without translation
      Now,chat correspondence with the world can be in their own language!
      – Voice chat with the translation of “voice in voice” in real time.
      – Search for friends to communicate (the possibility of an advanced search in the works)
      In addition, each of you can speak and hear each other on their own language!

    1. I am just in the process of making a github page https://github.com/AEInnovations/StarWarsDroidHelmets to host the source files, schematic, BoM, etc.

      In addition to that there’s some build background here on a blog post at: http://www.itcamefromtheworkshop.com/2016/02/star-wars-droid-translator-helmets.html

      Also some details on how hard making convincing “Droid” sounds turned out to be (it turned out to be a much bigger problem to solve than I expected) http://www.itcamefromtheworkshop.com/2016/02/making-star-wars-droid-translator.html

  2. Perhaps they should apply a FFT to the sound transmitted and then play beeps accordingly with the resulting frequencies.
    And the receiver could apply reverse FFT to restore the original message, without using radio link.

  3. already have a translator! DROTR – Droid Translator Calls&Chat translation
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tiwlab.droidtranslator&hl=en

    How it works – demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9rkES2dk0

    The video calls with translation “voice in voice” in real time! In addition, you will be able to speak, to see and hear each other on native language!
    – Chat with the translation and without translation
    Now,chat correspondence with the world can be in their own language!
    – Voice chat with the translation of “voice in voice” in real time.
    – Search for friends to communicate (the possibility of an advanced search in the works)
    In addition, each of you can speak and hear each other on their own language!

    https://ru-ru.facebook.com/DroidTranslator

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