Technically A Hack. Still Questionable. Remote Control Food.

We thought we were going to read an article about, perhaps, a quadcopter that could fetch beer, or donuts. What we got was more along the lines of a donut dragging itself across the floor, rendering it pitiful and advisibly indigestible.

Sometimes people joke about not wanting to get in mind of a crazy person. We understand. While we could certainly follow [Michael Kohn]’s logic, the motivation was alien. Either way, in a rare turn of events there was not a single Arduino to be seen; just reverse engineering, unique solutions, and even a custom board. This is what some of you have been asking for… we think.

The brain of the questionable contraption is a TI MSP430G2231 and a tiny forward only motor driver circuit. The MSP waits for a signal from a hacked IR remote control from a cheap RC car. It then turns those into the appropriate motor control signals which go to some of those nice tiny metal gearboxes.

There were, naturally, a lot of technical issues in mounting the electronics to the food that, well… they didn’t need to be solved, but they were solved. For example, masking tape apparently does not stick well to green peppers, so toothpicks must be employed to pin the tape in place. Hopefully knowledge like this is scheduled for the nightly wipe while we sleep, but we’ll probably hold onto  it till we die, unlike expensive piano lessons.

In the end we had a good laugh, and the idea is so dumb it will probably be an educational Kickstarter next week. Video after the break.

23 thoughts on “Technically A Hack. Still Questionable. Remote Control Food.

  1. The present storyline in the Vexxarr webcomic involves ships crewed by cyborg cake and pastries. The goal is to get the comestible crewed ships attacked by the Lattrox, which will consume the tasty, tasty crew. Unfortunately for the poor Lattrox, the cake they love the taste of is lethal to them.

  2. Unlike the author, I find this concept quite apple-ing. I don’t think you should squash someone elses inventiveness. Orange you glad you know something new today. Lettuce give thanks to this new knowledge. Dill, I think they could have peared down the options and perfected the vehicles.
    Off to go work on a banana-boat. hmmmm banana-catamaran?

  3. Maybe use lemon as source of power AND robot body!
    Or better yet, make some sort of EEG for plants, and check if still-alive veggies can follow the line or evade edge of table!

    …hmmm, back to the lab…

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