Robots Hacks

2367 Articles

Pi-Powered Robot Plays Puzzle & Dragons

February 10, 2016 by 8 Comments

Have you heard of the iPhone game Puzzle & Dragons? We understand it’s big in Japan. The puzzle part is all about rearranging colored orbs and grouping them together so they disappear and give you points. It’s also part RPG—each color is linked to a little guy, and every combo makes the matching-colored guy a little stronger. Then you fight monsters and take loot.

A YouTube user named [Junya Sakamoto] built a robot to play the game for him. It analyzes the board to come up with the best possible series of moves and then executes them using a Raspberry Pi. You can see what the robot is planning on the screen of a connected laptop. A couple of motors controlled with a Gertbot move a stylus up and down the screen and the phone itself back and forth.

There are two videos after the break. The first one is a combination build and demo video that proves this robot can do a lot more than just while away the hours playing Puzzle & Dragons. The second video demonstrates just how awesome it is at playing Puzzle & Dragons.

We like game-playing robots quite a bit around here. Here’s a Legoduino robot that plays Jurassic Park Builder. This other robot was built to test apps, but it plays Angry Birds in its spare time.

Continue reading “Pi-Powered Robot Plays Puzzle & Dragons” →

Vacuum? No, Tonight We Go To War Against The Dust Mite

February 1, 2016 by 8 Comments

For those of us lucky enough to own a Roomba, it makes taking care of dust in your house a breeze — but it could be better. Which is why [Marcel] spent his weekend upgrading his Roomba — or should we say, Doomba.

He started out with modest intentions. What’s stopping his Roomba from going a bit faster? He was pretty sure he could crank up the output a little bit. Donning his white lab coat and safety glasses, he set out do upgrade this little bot into something much more formidable.

Continue reading “Vacuum? No, Tonight We Go To War Against The Dust Mite” →

Adorable Quadruped Robot Hops And Walks

January 29, 2016 by 16 Comments

The ESP8266 is finding its way into all sorts of projects these days. It’s a capable little device, to be sure, but we’d have to say that finding it running a quadruped robot that can hop and run was a little unexpected. And to have it show up in such an adorable design was pretty cool too.

From the looks of [Javier Isabel]’s build log, he put a lot of thought into [Kame]. All the body parts and linkages are 3D printed from PLA, with the nice touch of adding a contrasting color. The legs are powered by eight high-speed Turnigy servos, and good quality bearings are used in the linkages. A NodeMCU runs the show with custom oscillator algorithms that control the various gaits, including the hopping motion. The BOM even lists “Adhesive 12mm diameter eyes” – perhaps that’s some sort of slang for the more technically correct “googly eyes.”

Built primarily as a test platform for studying different gaits, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of sensors in [Kame]’s current incarnation. But with an ESP8266 under the hood, the possibilities for autonomous operation are good. We look forward to seeing where this project goes next. And we kid about the cuteness factor, but never doubt the power of an attractive design to get the creative juices flowing.

We’ve covered a lot of quadruped robots before, and a lot of them seem to trend toward the cute end of the spectrum. Check out this baby-quad that’s learning to walk or this quad that thinks it’s a puppy.

Continue reading “Adorable Quadruped Robot Hops And Walks” →

Open Furby Opens The Furby

January 29, 2016 by 16 Comments

Remember Furby? The cute reactive robot was all the rage a few years ago, when the strange chattering creature was found under many a Christmas tree. Most Furbys have been sadly neglected since then, but the Open Furby project aims to give the toy a new lease of life, transforming it into an open source social robot platform.

We’ve featured a few Furby hacks before, such as the wonderful Furby Gurdy and the Internet connected Furby but the Open Furby project aims to create an open platform, rather than creating a specific hack. It works by replacing the brains of the Furby with a FLASH controller that runs the Robot Operating System (ROS), making the Furby much easier to program and control. They have also replaced the eyes with small OLED screens, which means it can do things like show a weather forecast, facebook notification, etc.

It is still in the early stages, but it looks like an interesting project. Personally, I am waiting for the evil Furby that wants to kill you and eat your flesh with that nasty beak…

Continue reading “Open Furby Opens The Furby” →

Warbots: Is It Already Too Late?

January 28, 2016 by 53 Comments

In 1971, a non-profit formed that holds the World Economic Forum each year. The Forum claims it “Engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” This year, the Forum hosted a session: What If: Robots Go To War? Participants included a computer science professor, an electrical engineering professor, the chairman of BAE, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, and a Time magazine editor.

Continue reading “Warbots: Is It Already Too Late?” →

It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, No… It’s High Voltage EPROM Man!

January 26, 2016 by 29 Comments

At Hackaday, we cover some pretty high-tech builds. Sometimes, though, you see something simple, but it still makes you feel happy to see it. That’s pretty much the case with [ProtoG’s] High Voltage EPROM Man.

The parts probably came out of a junk box, but the good news is that they don’t have to work, and you can freely substitute anything you have. According to [ProtoG], the “robot” head is a bulb socket with a crystal for the visor. The arms are fuses with fuse clips for the hands. The knees are adjustable caps, and the feet are TO-220 transistors.

Continue reading “It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, No… It’s High Voltage EPROM Man!” →

How To Use Lidar With The Raspberry Pi

January 22, 2016 by 29 Comments

The ability to inexpensively but accurately measure distance between an autonomous vehicle or robot and nearby objects is a challenging problem for hackers. Knowing the distance is key to obstacle avoidance. Running into something with a small robot may be a trivial problem but could be deadly with a big one like an autonomous vehicle.

My interest in distance measurement for obstacle avoidance stems from my entry in the 2013 NASA Sample Return Robot (SRR) Competition. I used a web camera for vision processing and attempted various visual techniques for making measurements, without a lot of success. At the competition, two entrants used scanning lidars which piqued my interest in them.

Continue reading “How To Use Lidar With The Raspberry Pi” →