An Interactive Tomato Farm Overseen By AI

July 7, 2026 by Ian Bos 13 Comments

Oh, the farming lifestyle…living off the land, fending for yourself. But who’s got time for all that? For the modern hacker, the best option in the garden space may be this over-engineered automated AI tomato farm created by [Gerd Nicolay]. You can even interact with it right now through the magic of the Internet.

[Gerd] started off with your run-of-the-mill pot and plant, choosing the humble tomato to keep the system simple. Then things started to escalate, with the addition of automatic lighting, watering, and data logging environmental parameters like humidity. Now we’re getting somewhere, but there’s more that can be added. How about an entire AI council to monitor and decide the fate of each individual tomato while recording an entire storyline to go alongside the growing cycle?

That’s right, four different models collaborate to ensure only the utmost quality of care for these tomatoes based on camera feeds, humidity, and various other environmental factors being recorded constantly. Is this a little overkill? Maybe for those who have even a modest sense of gardening knowledge — but who can bash the mountain of documentation and data collection on these wonderful little plants?

Perhaps the best part: you can recommend actions for the AI counsel to take from the comfort of your own web browser. While the TomatoFarm might be slightly unnecessary for the average farmer, if you want to try a more reasonable monitoring system, we have you covered too!

Love Complex Automata? Don’t Miss The Archer

February 21, 2026 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

[Oliver Pett] loves creating automata; pieces of art whose physicality and motion come together to deliver something unique. [Oliver] also has a mission, and that mission is to complete the most complex automata he has ever attempted: The Archer. This automaton is a fully articulated figure designed to draw arrows from a quiver, nock them in a bow, draw back, and fire — all with recognizable technique and believable motions. Shoot for the moon, we say!

He’s documenting the process of creating The Archer in a series of videos, the latest of which dives deep into just how intricate and complex of a challenge it truly is as he designs the intricate cams required.

A digital, kinematic twin in Rhino 3D helps [Oliver] to choose key points and determine the cam profiles required to effect them smoothly.

In simple automata rotational movement can be converted by linkages to create the required motions. But for more complicated automata (like the pen-wielding Maillardet Automaton), cams provide a way to turn rotational movement into something much more nuanced. While creating the automaton and designing appropriate joints and actuators is one thing, designing the cams — never mind coordinating them with one another — is quite another. It’s a task that rapidly cascades in complexity, especially in something as intricate as this.

[Oliver] turned to modern CAD software and after making a digital twin of The Archer he’s been using it to mathematically generate the cam paths required to create the desired movements and transitions, instead of relying on trial and error. This also lets him identify potential collisions or other errors before any metal is cut. The cams are aluminum, so the fewer false starts and dead ends, the better!

Not only is The Archer itself a beautiful piece of work-in-progress, seeing an automaton’s movements planned out in this way is a pretty interesting way to tackle the problem. We can’t wait to see the final result.

Thanks [Stephen] for the tip!

Hackaday Links: June 22, 2025

June 22, 2025 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Hold onto your hats, everyone — there’s stunning news afoot. It’s hard to believe, but it looks like over-reliance on chatbots to do your homework can turn your brain into pudding. At least that seems to be the conclusion of a preprint paper out of the MIT Media Lab, which looked at 54 adults between the ages of 18 and 39, who were tasked with writing a series of essays. They divided participants into three groups — one that used ChatGPT to help write the essays, one that was limited to using only Google search, and one that had to do everything the old-fashioned way. They recorded the brain activity of writers using EEG, in order to get an idea of brain engagement with the task. The brain-only group had the greatest engagement, which stayed consistently high throughout the series, while the ChatGPT group had the least. More alarmingly, the engagement for the chatbot group went down even further with each essay written. The ChatGPT group produced essays that were very similar between writers and were judged “soulless” by two English teachers. Go figure.

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Flat Earth Theatre presents "R.U.R." by Karel Capek. January 23 - 31, 2009. Featuring Michael Wayne Smith, Karen Hart, Valerie Daum, Jeff Tidwell, Kevin Kordis, James Rossi, Bill Conley, Justus Perry, and Amy Lehrmitt. Directed by Jake Scaltreto. Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown.

Robot: You Keep Using That Word But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

January 24, 2024 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

The flute player automaton by Innocenzo Manzetti (1840)

With many words which are commonly used in everyday vocabulary, we are certain that we have a solid grasp of what they do and do not mean, but is this really true? Take the word ‘robot’ for example, which is more commonly used wrongly rather than correctly when going by the definition of the person who coined it: [Karel Čapek]. It was the year 1920 when his play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti was introduced to the world, which soon saw itself translated and performed around the world, with the English-speaking world knowing it as R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.

Up till then, the concept of a relatively self-operating machine was known as an automaton, as introduced by the Ancient Greeks, with the term ‘android’ being introduced as early as the 18th century to mean automatons that have a human-like appearance, but are still mechanical contraptions. When [Čapek] wrote his play, he did not intend to have non-human characters that were like these androids, but rather pure artificial life: biochemical systems much like humans, using similar biochemical principles as proteins, enzymes, hormones and vitamins, assembled from organic matter like humans. These non-human characters he called ‘roboti’, from Old Czech ‘robot’ (robota: “drudgery, servitude”), who looked human, but lacked a ‘soul’.

Despite this intent, the run-away success of R.U.R. led to anything android- and automaton-like being referred to as a ‘robot’, which he lamented in a 1935 column in Lidové Noviny. Rather than whirring and clunking pieces of machinery being called ‘automatons’ and ‘androids’ as they had been for hundreds of years, now his vision of artificial life had effectively been wiped out. Despite this, to this day we can still see the traces of the proper terms, for example when we talk about ‘automation’, which is where automatons (‘industrial robots’) come into play, like the industrial looms and kin that heralded the Industrial Revolution.

(Heading image: Performance of R.U.R. by Flat Earth Theatre, showing the mixing of robot ingredients)

A long, skeletal neck of a swan automaton sits on a table. Two men are on either side of it, lowering the swan's body back on.

Restoring The Silver Swan Automaton

November 18, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 15 Comments

It’s easier than ever to build your own robot, but humans have been building automatons since before anyone had even thought of electronics. One beautiful example is the Silver Swan, built in the 18th century.

The brainchild of [John Joseph Merlin] and silversmith [James Cox], the swan features three separate clockwork drives, appearing to swim in a moving river where it snatches fish in its motorized beak. Mark Twain said the swan had “a living grace about his movements and living intelligence in his eyes” when he saw it at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867.

The swan has been delighting people for 250 years, and recently received some much-deserved maintenance. In the video below, you can see museum staff disassembling the swan including its 113 neck rings which protect the three different chain drives controlling its lifelike motions. Hopefully, with some maintenance, this automaton will still be going strong in 2273.

If you’d like to Bring Back the Age of Automatons, perhaps you should study this bird bath or the “Draughtsman-Writer.”

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The Chess Computer From 1912

July 3, 2023 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Who was [Leonardo Torres Quevedo]? Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the next century’s obsession with computers playing chess.

Don’t confuse this with the infamous Mechanical Turk, which appeared to be a chess computer but was really a guy hiding inside a fake chess computer. The Spanish engineer’s machine really did play a modified end game. The chessboard was vertical, and pegs represented pieces. There were mechanical arms to move the pegs. The device actually dates back to 1912, with a public demonstration in Paris in 1914. Given [Quevedo’s] native language, the machine was called El Ajedrecista.

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The Most Ornate Birdbath You’ve Ever Seen

June 4, 2023 by Danie Conradie 8 Comments

When one thinks of art, a birdbath may not be the first thing that comes to mind. However, there is no denying that the La Fontaine aux Oiseaux (The Bird Fountain) is a true work of art. This automaton, created by automaton maker [François Junod] in collaboration with 20 different workshops and craftsmen, represents thousands of hours of work and boasts a complex beauty that is both visible and hidden.

Commissioned by the Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry company, this purely mechanical display piece features a pair of jewel-encrusted birds that perform a little routine around the edge of the bath every hour. All the birds’ appendages move while bird song is added with the help of a whistle and bellows. The “water” is also mechanized, with a series of metal plates moving together to create ripple effects, while a water lily opens and closes and a dragonfly flutters above the surface.

The overall effect of this ridiculously over-the-top mechanical art piece is absolutely mesmerizing. Even if the bejeweled exterior isn’t quite your style, you can still appreciate its intricate workings thanks the video after the break giving us a peek at the development.

We’ve featured some of [François]’ other work before, which is equally impressive and displays the mechanics in all it’s glory. If you want to try your hand at making automatons, 3D printing is the perfect way to get started.

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