This year, [Thomas]’ neighborhood has gone from a quiet burg to a bustling lane full of families and children who go out walking for exercise and a change of scenery. Early on, a game emerged to distract children from the pandemic by turning these walks into bear hunts — that is, looking for stuffed bears sitting in the windows of houses and keeping count of them.
With no stuffed bears in the house, he decided to join in the fun by pasting up a 2D panda bear in the window that’s cute enough to calm anyone’s nerves. That was fun for a while, but then he turned it up to eleven by making an interactive 3D version named Bubbles the Bear that blows bubbles and speaks in a friendly voice.
Bubbles sits in a second-story window and waits for passers-by to press one of the buttons mounted on the utility pole below. Both buttons are wired to a 433MHz remote that sends a signal to an ESP32 in Bubbles’ habitat that says it’s time to perform.
We particularly like the bubble maker that [Thomas] designed, which aims a blower fan with an air concentrator at a carousel of 3D printed bubble wands. Both the fan and the carousel can be controlled with a custom web app, and he gets an email every time Bubbles has a visitor that tells him how much bubble liquid is left. Check out the fun-size demo after the break.
Bubbles are fun, especially if you can make them in extremely large quantities. Bubbles can also do work — remember this next time you need a random number generator.
that button gonna spark a new outbreak…
Instead of a hand-pressed button there should be IR proximity sensor. I made a disinfection liquid dispenser with such a sensor. There’s a MCU which turns on an IR LED, waits a few miliseconds, measures signal from phototransistor (with filter blocking other wavelengths), turns the LED off, waits again and measures. If the difference between signals when LED is on and off (can be averaged or summed after many measurements) reaches some treshold, it’s considered as user’s hand is approached.
What about a simple wireless light receiver across the street and a laser on the house, when a person breaks the beam the receiver triggers the bear.
Beautiful project!
Im wondering if it would be possible a simplification so we can make a loooot of bubbles in a lot of corners
a bit spendy, but if you want a lot of bubbles the ADJ Bubbletron is a great device. I have one for Halloween, plan to get another one this year. But really it’s just a plastic bucket with a fan and a spinning wheel, so any hacker could slap one together in an afternoon.
The key to good bubbles is good bubble fluid. Get the cheap stuff and you’ll get no bubbles and cranky kids.
May be a sound activated switch so the child can say something and Teddy would react.
That would be illegal here. Attaching anything to public property is illegal.
That’s the case in many places. Fortunately nobody cares – police and judges do have discretionary powers and something like this would slide
The original article for the bubble blowing bear is no longer available (site closed in Aug 2021). But a reprint is available from dropbox:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/loucjr92vyf93ie/Bubble_Blowing_Bear_Build.pdf?dl=0
Also here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210128143304/https://www.rc-cam.com/forum/index.php?/topic/4949-bubble-blowing-bear-the-story-of-my-pandemic-panda/