The Story Of Mr. Stabby

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHvXPOSaNbg]

Mr. Stabby was once a broken down bum, sitting on the curb, waiting for an eternity in the city dump. Luckily, someone found him and brought him to the NYC Resistor hacker group. They promptly performed some modifications and brought him back to life.

He’s now a happy go lucky stab-bot with a twinkle in his eye and a skip in his step. His repitoir includes gouging, slashing, and of course stabbing. He can be controlled via a cell phone and has a nifty voice interface.

The video above is from when Mr. Stabby was runner up at the tech crunch hackday.

24 thoughts on “The Story Of Mr. Stabby

  1. Why is this so dumb?

    The most impressive thing is how much work and humor they put into the twilio script. Now it would be great if they actually took a proper video to where you could hear what the heck was being said so we could laugh with them.

  2. They got a robot they didn’t know what to do with??

    What was it supposed to even be doing? Great you rebuilt it and fixed it, but dang man, put it to a better used than just that. Maybe playing chess even??

  3. The robot doesn’t really have a purpose, all the actions are completely binary, so it’s impossible to control. Chess is out of the question, unless you’re talking about throwing pieces across the room. What else would you use it for?

  4. Well, nay sayers.

    This was a hackday project, as in 24 hours maximum time available. So don’t expect it to be engineered to perfection.

    If you are underwhelmed by the video, I am sorry. I’m no michael bay. Next time I do a video of one of my projects I’ll add a bunch of explosions lots and lots of lens flare and some women with sharp knees.

    In regards to the robot and us not knowing what to do with it… obviously we know EXACTLY what to do with it… HAVE FUN. Put down the haterade. It’s a freaking robot. That’s pretty cool.

    The range of motion available to the arm isn’t really useful in most applications. We do what we can.

    Heh I love internet comments. More than that, I love that no one has complained about violating the three laws yet.

  5. What I don’t get is the backstory. The video cuts in several seconds into the explanation, apparently. The blurb says nothing. The website says nothing. Was this really ‘at the curb’, or is that elaboration? What is/was it?

    If they leave industrial robots at the curb where you live, I wanna move there.

  6. Gizmodo reposted a blog story about the origins of the robot that apparently was done by a columbia student who saw it at a craft night event. It was pretty thoroughly researched albeit a bit erronous.

    All we really know is that it at one point belonged to CCNY ( a community college ). It was manufactured in 1988. It was given to us by a guy who had it in his apt. He claimed to have found it in the trash on the literal curb. He was moving and wanted to get rid of it.

    It’s since been repaired and several iterations of controller boxes have been built. The hackday saw the first use of relays to control the device and thus the first integration of a microcontroller and all the subsequent awesome attached to that.

  7. We’re not (well…I’M not) ripping on your project.

    All I’m saying is that I’m a little underwhelmed because it looks like you’ve just tapped a knife on the end of a robotic arm and let it spin around.

    Knife + Catchy Name does not equal coolness to me. Unless I’ve missed something important.

  8. The interesting part is that you can use an actual phone, using normal phone menus, to make a robot do something. This involves like 5 different layers of fairly complicated stuff, all communicating, to accomplish this.

    That being said, this is a *robot* that can *stab* things, through an amusing phone interface. That’s pretty awesome. If anyone can make a better robot, with a better interface, that’s better at stabbing things, I would love to see it here on hackaday =)

  9. that’s crazy to have such a setup for such a simple and stupid project. one of the creator says ” well we had fun “.. well alright I can have fun playing with my cat but I aint gonna post that on the internet..

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