Slothra, Arduino Powered Plushy Sloth

slothra

[Daniel] sent in this project. He tells us it’s an Arduino powered kid’s toy that “furiously swings his arms” when you squeeze his chest. As you can see in the video on the site, furious is up for interpretation. It is a sloth though, maybe that’s sloth furious.  While it is cute and we do applaud the effort, anyone with children will agree that this is a step down in destruction for a 3 year old. You’re going to have to spice it up a bit, or give it a timer and make it free standing, make it roar or something to make it more appealing.  What recommendations do you guys have to improve this toy?

32 thoughts on “Slothra, Arduino Powered Plushy Sloth

  1. I see “<!– vimeo error: not a vimeo video –>” in the page source.

    Caleb? Care to fix it?

    P.S. It looks like your site may be vulnerable to XSS, since my post with its angle brackets was presented verbatim.

  2. fixed, sort of. I’m having an issue where it publishes my second to last autosave. I think it’s the connection I work on during the day. Also the video won’t embed. I have no idea why.

    Thanks for your patience guys.

  3. Great concept, poor execution. You know when you have a really funny idea or joke and then try to implement that idea or joke and it completely fails? This is what happened here.

  4. From looking at the video, it looks like you squeeze the left side to make the left arm move, and vise-versa for the right side.

    IMO it might be better if you just pressed once in the middle, then both arms moved psudo-randomly for a set time period.

    Make it free-standing, and add a bit of waist movement perhaps? Sort of like Tickle-me-Elmo, but with more ‘bish-bash-bosh gonna knock that down’?

  5. I’ve been trying _really_hard_ not to comment on this lately but ok here it is: This does *NOT* require an Arduino. Most things that use Arduino DO NOT require Arduino. I’ve been working as an electrical and software engineer for quite some time and I appreciate that the Arduino is getting people into this field, and I’m not bashing this project, but… I just hope that people realize that most places Arduino is used, there exist cheaper and simpler solutions. On that note, the Arduino likely has more computing power than my first PC (sans the FPU).

    But I digress, cute project, keep the hacks coming!

  6. Does every article now suddenly have to end with a question? Do you think you know the answer? Am I just wondering? Does hackaday feel there are too few comments posted? I think there’s evidence they do, don’t you?

    Incidentally it’s true, there’s now legion of people who seemingly know nothing about electronics at all but only know arduinos and can onlyw ork with those, weird but hey if that is how the world is going that is how the world is going, at least now all projects not involving one are very professional since they are done by highly trained experts and not amateurs anymore.

    It might be a bit of a loss though but with most electronics now being too tiny and too embedded to alter I guess it’s a natural development.

  7. Hack-A-Day guys: you can do much better than this. Seriously. There have been a couple of lame posts lately. You know, if you don’t have good hacks just don’t post anything. Don’t torture your viewers with this type of lame posts, just for the sake of posting something…. C’mon!

  8. I can’t really tell by the video, but it looks like the arms are beng directly driven by servos and vulnerable. I’m pretty sue that any child could break that in the first five seconds.

    I appreciate off-beat humor, good job.

    Oh btw, hard “P”s in audio recording irritate me to no end.

  9. Who cares if its crap by every definable metric – IT HAS AN ARDUINO IN IT.
    Even if the concept, execution, craft, and every other possible way to judge it sucks, and even if the arduino in it isn’t even necessary – IT HAS AN ARDUINO IN IT.

    That’s enough right there for Hackaday, so why isn’t it enough for you all?

    Oh, thats right, we’re not getting paid to fellate Arduino.

  10. the only way to improve this is to realize it has no future and cut the losses. Secondly step back and re-think things. i’m with eric on this one. not everything is required to be powered by a microcontroller. i have yet to come across a project which has demonstrated 1/4 the potential of a microcontroller. What is next? The Led flasher 2009, look ma only 30k of code @ 20mhz. Some of us imagined a future full of cheap computers, good free software and digital electronics everywhere. What we did not realize was that this would create a new type of want to be. Like others i am glad to see people working with electronics/computers but feel that there are unspoken rules to be followed simply out of respect. that respect seems to be missing nowadays. I equate it with the days of playing NES. You could either play a game or your couldn’t. Then suddenly a magical box appeared that allowed anyone to get to any level in a game, so even the lame could pretend to be great. If you can’t make the correlation here the finger is pointing at you. your video camera, new pc & software, and high speed internet do not give you skill. skill comes with experience, and experience comes with time. to end this rant i think this article belongs on hackaday to serve as a wake up call.

  11. awww man, i thought this was some sort of abusive tickle me elmo where kids hugged the thing, and then it proceeded to beat them furiously. instead, it does not do that.

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