Simple Robot Assembled From E-Waste Actually Looks Pretty Cool

If you’re designing a robot for a specific purpose, you’re probably ordering fresh parts and going with a clean sheet design. If you’re just building for fun though, you can just go with whatever parts you have on hand. That’s how [Sorush Moradisani] approached building Esghati—a “robot made from garbage.”

Remote viewing made easy.

The body of the robot is an old Wi-Fi router that was stripped clean, with the antenna left on for a classic “robot” look. The wheels are made out of old diffusers cut off of LED lamps. Two servos are used to drive the wheels independently, allowing the robot to be steered in a rudimentary tank-style fashion. Power is courtesy of a pair of 18650 lithium-ion cells. The brains of the robot is an ESP32-CAM—a microcontroller board which includes a built-in camera. Thanks to its onboard Wi-Fi, it’s able to host its own website that allows control of the robot and transmits back pictures from the camera. The ESP32 cam itself is mounted on the “head” on the robot for a good field of view. Meanwhile, it communicates with a separate Arduino Nano which is charged with generating pulses to run the drive servos. Code is on Github for the curious.

It’s not a complicated robot by any means—it’s pretty much just something you can drive around and look through the camera, at this stage. Still, it’s got plenty of onboard processing power and you could do a lot more with it. Plus, the wireless control opens up a lot of options. With that said, you’d probably get sick of the LED bulb wheels in short order—they offer precious little grip on just about any surface. Really, though, it just goes to show you how a bit of junk e-waste can make a cute robot—it almost has Wall-E vibes. Video after the break.

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Hackaday Links: March 9, 2025

It’s been a busy week in space news, and very little of it was good. We’ll start with the one winner of the week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon’s surface on March 2. The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and carries ten scientific payloads, including a GPS/GNSS receiver that successfully tracked signals from Earth-orbiting satellites. All of the scientific payloads have completed their missions, which is good because the lander isn’t designed to withstand the long, cold lunar night only a few days away. The landing makes Firefly the first commercial outfit to successfully soft-land something on the Moon, and being the first at anything is always a big deal.

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Underwater Robotics Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, February 5 at noon Pacific for the Underwater Robotics Hack Chat with Tony White!

Almost anywhere you look, there’s a good chance you can see a robot at work. Whether they’re sweeping your floors, delivering a snack, building a car, or even driving one, robots are everywhere on this planet. And since over 70% of this planet is covered in water, it makes sense that robots should be there, too. Getting a robot to work underwater at all is one thing, but getting it to work underwater reliably can be quite a challenge. Water always finds a way to ruin your day, after all, and this reality only worsens when you add a little salt into the mix.

join-hack-chatTony White knows the marine engineering field well, having worked in the space for over a decade. He’s currently an applications engineer at Blue Robotics, where he’s worked on everything from full-size autonomous surface vessels to underwater swarm robots. He’s stopping by the Hack Chat to talk about the harsh engineering realities of underwater automation, so if you’ve ever wanted to take the plunge, you’ll want to come to this Hack Chat for sure.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

 

‘Robotic’ Dress Uses Simple Techniques To Combine 3D Printed Parts With Fabric

By and large, our clothes don’t actively move. They’re simple pieces of fabric assembled to sit nicely on our bodies, and little more. [anoukwipprecht] created something a little more technological and confronting, though, with the Robotic Open-Source Scale Dress.

Right from the drop, you can see what the dress is all about. It’s an open-shoulder design that has eight large moving scales mounted on the front. These scales are printed, and each features its own servo for independent movement. The scale baseplates are designed to hide the servos themselves, creating a sleeker look that hides the mechanism underneath. Each baseplate is also perforated with holes, allowing it to be sewn on to the base garment in a stout fashion. The dress itself is created with thick neoprene fabric, enabling it to take the weight of the scale assemblies without sagging or pulling away from the body. You can even customize the scales in various ways—such as adding feathers instead.

The dress is a neat piece, and would catch eyes for its pointy scales alone. The fact that they can start moving at any time only increases the garment’s impact. We’ve seen some other great fashionable uses of 3D printing before, too, like these awesome printed shoes. Meanwhile, if you’re printing your own garments in your home lab, don’t hesitate to let us know! Or, even better… wear them to the next Hackaday event!

3D-Printed RC Car Focuses On Performance Fundamentals

There are a huge number of manufacturers building awesome radio-controlled cars these days. However, sometimes you just have to go your own way. That’s what [snamle] did with this awesome 3D-printed RC car—and the results are impressive.

This build didn’t just aim to build something that looked vaguely car-like and whizzed around on the ground. Instead, it was intended to give [snamle] the opporunity to explore the world of vehicle dynamics—learning about weight distribution, suspension geometry, and so many other factors—and how these all feed into the handling of a vehicle. The RC side of things is all pretty straightforward—transmitter, receiver, servos, motors, and a differential were all off-the-shelf. But the chassis design, the steering, and suspension are all bespoke—designed by [snamle] to create a car with good on-road handling and grip.

It’s a small scale testbed, to be sure. Regardless, there’s no better way to learn about how a vehicle works on a real, physical level—you can’t beat building one with your own two hands and figuring out how it works.

It’s true, we see a lot of 3D printed RC cars around these parts. Many are built with an eye to robotics experimentation or simply as a learning exercise. This one stands out for its focus on handling and performance, and of course that nicely-designed suspension system. Video after the break.

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Robotics Class Is Open

If you are like us, you probably just spin up your own code for a lot of simple projects. But that’s wasteful if you are trying to do anything serious. Take a robot, for example. Are you using ROS (Robot Operating System)? If not — or even if you are — check out [Janne Karttunene] and the University of Eastern Finland’s open-source course Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials.

The material is on GitHub. Rather than paraphrase, here’s the description from the course itself:

This course is designed to give you hands-on experience with the basics of robotics using ROS 2 and Gazebo simulation. The exercises focus on the Andino robot from Ekumen and are structured to gradually introduce you to ROS 2 and Docker.

No prior experience with ROS 2 or Docker is needed, and since everything runs through Docker, you won’t need to install ROS 2 on your system beforehand. Along the way, you’ll learn essential concepts like autonomous navigation and mapping for mobile robots. All the practical coding exercises are done in Python.

Topics include SLAM, autonomous navigation, odometry, and path planning. It looks like it will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in robotics or anything else you might do with ROS.

If you want a quick introduction to ROS, we can help. We’ve seen a number of cool ROS projects over the years.

Robot Air Hockey Player Predicts Your Next Move

Air hockey is a fun game, but it’s one you can’t play by yourself. That is, unless you have a smart robot hockey player to act as your rival. [Zeroshot] built exactly that.

The build is based around a small 27-inch air hockey table—not exactly arcade-spec, but big enough to demonstrate the concepts at play. The robot player moves its mallet in the X and Y axes using a pair of NEMA17 stepper motors and an H-belt configuration. To analyze the game state, there’s a Raspberry Pi 3B fitted with a camera, and it has a top-down view of the board. The Pi gives the stepper motors commands on how to move the mallet via an Arduino that communicates with the stepper drivers.  The Pi doesn’t just aim for the puck itself, either. With Python and OpenCV, it tries to predict your own moves by tracking your mallet, and the puck, too. It predicts the very-predictable path of the puck, and moves itself to the right position for effective defence.

Believe it or not, we’ve featured quite a few projects in this vein before. They’ve all got their similarities, and their own unique quirks. Video after the break.
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