2022 Sci-Fi Contest: The Animatronic Baby Yoda You’ve Always Wanted

April 19, 2022 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

Simple robot parts make up the internals.

When it comes to sci-fi, it’s hard to go past Star Wars, and many submissions to our contest land in that exact universe. [Kevin Harrington]’s entry is one such example, with his animatronic Baby Yoda that’s exactly as cute as you’d hope it would be.

The build is based on a Pololu Romi chassis, a simple two-wheeled differential-drive robot platform. It’s paired with a robot arm in the form of Hephaestus Arm 2, which provides the articulation for the precocious little creature. An ESP32 microcontroller serves as the brains of the operation, controlling all the servos and motors that make baby Yoda move. Control is via WiFi, using a website hosted on the ESP32 via RBE1001lib.

The animatronic baby Yoda would surely be a hit sitting on one’s shoulder at any sci-fi convention. Overall, it’s a simple robot that becomes more personable by skinning it with an adorable toy. It’s not the first baby Yoda (or Grogu) that we’ve seen, either – the popular character has inspired builds before, too! Video after the break.

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Mini DarkTower Clone Restores Your Childhood

April 15, 2022 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Remember DarkTower? No? Well, it’s a really cool combination board game, RPG, and computer game from 1981. Orson Welles pimped it on TV and explained it thusly: “collect three keys, lay siege to the tower, and defeat the enemy within”. The Tower itself was a battery-powered computer on lazy Susan that showed numbers on a couple of 7-segment displays, pictures via three carousels, and had a 12-button keypad. Thanks to a lawsuit, few copies remain, and even fewer of them are in working condition.

Working copies of DarkTower go for hundreds online, but who can afford such an extravagance when these 40+ year old towers are prone to battery leakage and loose connections? Certainly not [Mighty Studios], who was hoping to give the gift of DarkTower to a friend and decided to build a mini reproduction instead. Fortunately for us, the project is completely open source. You can check out the build video below, which has plenty of links, including one that goes to the code.

In this day and age, it doesn’t take much to reproduce the internals of the Tower. [Mighty Studios] pulled it off with a Feather S2, a 320 x 420 TFT LCD screen, a speaker, and a couple of momentary buttons. The screen can show all the pictures, (which were only displayed one at a time in the original game anyway), any necessary numbers, and all the requisite menu options.

[Mighty Studios] got mighty lucky when it came to the case, as [Stinkevil] had already created a dice tower version and put it on Thingiverse. After a bit of tweaking and some hole-punching, [Mighty Studios] had a mini tower scaled to the Feather S2 with just enough room to stuff in all the components and wires. Between a PDF of the original rule book and someone’s Java version of the game, [Mighty Studios] had plenty to use as a guide for programming in the rule set before mailing it off to their friend. We have to admit, we’re pretty jealous.

Don’t want to amass an army and conquer evil forces? There are all types of board games you could emulate with a microcontroller.

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Lego Fourteen-Segment Display Needs Plenty Of Motors

April 12, 2022 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

Hackers love 7-segment displays, and will gladly wax lyrical about the silly words you can almost spell on them and so on. Less appreciated are their bigger cousins, the fourteen and sixteen segment displays, which get all alphanumeric about things and are thus much easier for humans to read. You can even build the former out of Lego, as [ord] demonstrates.

A look at the mechanism driving the display.

The “segments” are made up of Lego shafts that are pushed up through a yellow matrix of holes when they are switched “on.” A full seven motors are used to make the single-character display work, each one driving two segments. Two Lego Powered Up controller bricks are required to drive everything going on here, making the final design not just mechanically complicated, but electronically complicated as well.

Amusingly, those don’t come cheap, either; the parts total cost of this build is likely somewhere between $50-100 US. You probably don’t want to build an entire scrolling message board using this design, even if it does look resplendent in black and taxi yellow.

We’ve seen [ord]’s work before, too, in the form of these mechanically magnificent 7-segment Lego displays. Video after the break.

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This End Table Conceals A Close Encounter

April 11, 2022 by Jenny List 18 Comments

If you’re of a Certain Age, perhaps you had a train set as a child. An oval of track, a loco, and some rolling stock; it matters not whether it was Thomas the Tank Engine or a large express train — they were at the time a pretty cool toy. Move forward a few decades, and model railways have become either super-expensive room-filler layouts, or have sunk low as novelty Christmas ornaments, so that the basic loop of track is in dire need of rescue. Perhaps [Peter Waldraff] can help, with a beautifully-constructed N gauge circular layout concealed in an end table. Even better, when you examine it closely, it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary train set, it’s a scene from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

This is a project of two equally well-made parts, the piece of furniture and the train. The former is entirely scratch-built, with a cylindrical outside made from carefully cut rings of plywood and a sliding riser mechanism in the centre with a concrete counterweight. Slide the cylinder upwards, and the layout is revealed — a scratch-built hill in the centre of the ring of track and the lit-up underside of the UFO above it. As the train goes round the track, it even triggers a set of crossing lights and sounds for extra realism. The full story can be seen in the video below the break, and is well worth a watch.

We’ve covered more than one concealed model railway layout in the past, and it comes as no surprise when browsing to find that [Peter]’s work has featured here before.

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Magnetic Hockey Game Uses A 555

April 6, 2022 by Jenny List 1 Comment

We love a good project here at Hackaday, particularly one that makes us want to pick it up and have a go at whatever it does for ourselves. And when we see such a project and find that it contains the One Chip To Rule Them All (otherwise known as the NE555 timer), our collective cup runneth over with joy. So [Andrew Fentem]’s magnetic hockey project certainly pushes all our buttons, as it’s a game superficially similar to an air hockey table in which a magnetic puck is accelerated by a handheld electronic bat.

The bats look extremely high-tech but are in fact surprisingly simple. Each one contains a Hall effect sensor which triggers the 555 which we’d expect is wired as a monostable, this in turn fires a MOSFET which energises an electromagnet for a set period of time. The puck is a magnet, and thus when it is detected by the Hall sensor it is shot away at high speed by the electromagnet. the result is a fast-paced game which has an extra edge over conventional air hockey, and which being honest, we’d love to have a go at. You can see it in the video below the break.

Of course, if your budget doesn’t stretch to not one but two chips in this era of semiconductor shortages, you can always try a conventional table.

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Building 7-Segment Displays With LEGO

March 30, 2022 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Utter the words “7-segment display” amongst hackers and you’ll typically get people envisaging the usual LED and LCD versions that we all come across in our daily lives. However, mechanical versions do exist, and [ord] has assembled a couple of designs of their very own.

The first uses what appears to be two LEGO motors to drive individual segments of the display. Each segment consists of a pair of yellow axles thrust up through a black grid to represent parts of the number, as well as a minus sign as needed. [ord] demonstrates it by using it to display angle data from a tilt sensor inside a LEGO Powered Up controller brick. Further photos on Flickr show the drive system from underneath.

The second design relies upon a drum-like mechanism that seems to only be capable of displaying numbers sequentially. It works in a manner not dissimilar to that of a player piano. The required movements to display each number are programmed into sequences with Technic pins sticking out of beams in a drum assembly driven by either a hand crank or motor. It’s again demonstrated by [ord] using it to display angular data.

While it’s unlikely we’ll see LEGO displays used as angle of attack meters in light aircraft, you could do so if you wanted a cheap and unreliable device that is likely to fall to pieces if unduly jostled. In any case, it’s not the first time we’ve seen LEGO 7-segment displays, but it’s always great to see a new creative take on an existing concept. We’d love to see such a design implemented into a fancy clock, or perhaps even a news ticker running on a 16-segment version. Video after the break.

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LEGO String Winder Hints At Greater Possibilities

March 29, 2022 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Unless you’re an avid fan of 1997’s box office hit Mouse Hunt, or actively working in the string industry, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how those balls of string are made. [ord] has, however, and built a tidy little winding machine that has us contemplating the possibilities of how useful LEGO machines can really be.

The design uses a large and imposing-looking ring gear to drive a spinning arm which carries the string onto the bobbin. The bobbin itself is rotated along with the spinning arm as the hand crank that operates the machine is mechanically linked to both. As the arm and bobbin turn, string is deposited onto the bobbin, building up into a pleasing ball of string that looks just like the ones you buy at the store.

We suspect that, unless [ord] is doing some very interesting things that we haven’t seen yet, the string was probably sourced off a reel or ball anyway, and this machine just serves to demonstrate how the process works.

However, it does go to show how LEGO machines can do real work. We’d love to see LEGO put to more practical uses like winding pickups or transformers, or other jobs that are maddeningly tedious when done by hand. Video after the break.

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