Convention-goers have likely strolled past a number of Daleks: the aliens drive around the event space, spouting threats of extermination and occasionally slapping folks with a rotating eyestalk. [James Bruton] has been hard at work building this Wii-remote-controlled Dalek with his fellow hackers at the SoMakeIt Hackerspace (you may remember our write-up from earlier this year).
Most Dalek builds seat a driver inside the body at the helm of a salvaged electric wheelchair, where they plunk around using a joystick control and simmer in an increasingly potent aroma. This version started like most, with a wooden structure from plans sourced at Project Dalek. Inside, however, [James] and his crew have tapped into the wheelchair’s motor controller to feed it a PWM signal from an Arduino Shrimp, which is linked to a Raspi. The Pi receives a Bluetooth signal from a Wiimote, and, through their custom Python script, directs the Dalek with ease.
They’re still working on finishing the Dalek’s body, but they’re using some clever tactics to push onward: using a 3D-printer to solve some of the nuanced styling choices. They’ve uploaded a gallery with additional photos on Facebook, and you can watch them goofing around with their creation (losing their balance and nearly exterminating themselves) in a video after the break.
Continue reading “Wiimote Controlled Extermination: Dalek-Style”
This is not an application that runs on the tablet, it is a completely separate device that ‘reads’ the tablet screen. As you could guess from the BrickPi name, the brains behind the operation is a Raspberry Pi. A camera takes a photograph of the displayed text and the Raspberry Pi converts that image file to text using Optical Character Recognition. A Text-to-Speech engine then speaks the text in a robotic sounding voice. In order to change the page the Raspberry Pi controls a Lego Mindstorms arm that swipes across the tablet screen and the entire process is repeated.
