I guess if you are going to build a robot to do something boring like telepresence, you might as well make it cute. That’s obviously what [Andrew Maurer] was thinking when he built a telepresence robot using a Wall-E toy. The result is kind of adorable: Wall-E is holding the 5-inch HDMI screen that shows the video, and can scoot around in true Pixar fashion under remote control.
It’s also a neat build on the inside, using a Raspberry Pi for the brains and an Adafruit MotorHat to control the motors. The original toy didn’t have motors, so he added a new RC gearbox and motors to drive the little fella around. Installed behind Wall-Es eye is a USB webcam. Running behind the scenes is a mumble server that does the audio, a copy of Chromium that shows the video, and an Apache server that feeds the captured video to the other end of the conversation. The whole thing is tied together by a few scripts that kick things off appropriately and allow the user to remotely control Wall-E. It’s a cute build, and hopefully Wall-E can still find his EVE while performing his new corporate duties.
[via reddit]
Notwithstanding a crappy place to document his work…all the same a nice hack.
Nevermind its better from https://imgur.com/a/z6IFa maybe link to this as well for the images and a sort of walk through
Wall-E dude, you sold out! You used to be cool.
I’ve been reading this site for a couple weeks now after adding it to my daily reads bookmarks thinking it was about innovation and invention, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s pretty much just an ongoing infomercial for selling raspberry pi and peripherals (for lack of a better word) like adafruit and etc.
I haven’t learned much and this article in particular was so hack-tastic in flogging a useless, stupid build just so you could get yet another mention of RASPBERRY PI and ADAFRUIT that I’m deleting the bookmark. I’m using my remove-a-bookmark finger while eating a blueberry muffin.