2023 Halloween Hackfest: Ouija Robot Is Even Creepier Than The Real Thing

October 2, 2023 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

When you’re a kid, nothing says spooky like turning off the lights and bringing out the Ouija board. For decades, this mystifying oracle has purported to channel the dead by spelling out messages using a board with numbers, letters, yes/no, and a heart-shaped windowed bit of plastic called a planchette.

While the action of a standard Ouija board owes itself to something called the ideomotor phenomenon, this motorized Ouija robot by [Ronald McCollum] is powered by tweets.

That’s right, the mannequin hand uses the planchette to spell out the tweets with a rather crisp snap of the wrist. [Ronald] impressively coded all the positions by hand, with each letter being comprised of both a hand position and planchette position.

This project utilizes both an Adafruit Crickit board and a Raspberry Pi, mostly because [Ronald] wanted to use the Crickit for something, and added the Pi to spell out the tweets on the display in real time. Check it out in action after the break, and stick around for a bonus video of the numbers being laser-cut.

Speaking of creepy motion, here’s a refrigerator clock that uses those colorful alphanumeric magnets.

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Robotic Acrobot Aces The Moves

January 12, 2023 by Anool Mahidharia 8 Comments

[Daniel Simu] is a performance artist, among many other things, and does acrobatic shows, quite often with a partner “flyer”. Training for his acts gets interrupted if his flyer partner is not available due to travel, injury or other reasons. This prompted him to build Acrobotics — a robotic assistant to make sure he can continue training uninterrupted.

He has some electronics and coding chops, but had to teach himself CAD so that he could do all of the design, assembly and programming himself. Acrobotics was developed as part of a Summer Sessions residency at V2_ (Lab for the Unstable Media) at Rotterdam in 2022.

The design is built around a mannequin body and things are quite simple at the moment. There are only two rotational joints for the arms at the shoulder, and no other articulations. Two car wiper motors rotate the two arms 360 deg in either direction. Continuous rotation potentiometers attached to the motors provide position feedback.

An ESP32 controls the whole thing, and the motors get juice via a pair of BTS7960 motor drivers. All of this is housed in a cage built from 15 mm aluminium extrusion and embedded in the torso of the mannequin. [Daniel] doesn’t enlighten us how the motor movements are synchronized with the music, but we do see a trailing cable attached to the mannequin. It’s likely the cable could be for power delivery, as well as some form of data or timing signals.

He’s working on the next version of the prototype, so we hope to see improved performances soon. There’s definitely scope for adding a suite of sensors – an IMU would help a lot to determine spatial orientation, maybe some ultrasonic sensors, or a LiDAR for object detection or mapping, or additional articulated joints at the elbows and wrists. We gotta love “feature creep”, right ?

Check out the two videos after the break – in the first one, he does an overview of the Acrobotics, and the second one is the actual performance that he did. Robot or not, it’s quite an amazing project and performance.
CAVEAT : We know calling this a “robot” is stretching the definition, by a lot, but we’re going to let it slip through.

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Sound-Reactive Mannequin Arms Make For Creepy Lounge Decor

December 9, 2021 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Music visualizers were all the rage back in era of Winamp and Windows Media Player. They’re even cooler when they don’t just live on your computer screen, though, as [Emily Velasco’s] latest project demonstrates.

The build consists of two mannequin arms on a board mounted on the wall. The arms were sourced for just $5 from a Sears that went out of business, and originally fastened to the mannequin thanks to magnets inside. Thus, putting two steel plates on the board allowed the arms to be attached, and they can be freely arranged as [Emily] sees fit.

The ESP32-based Pixelblaze LED controller serves as the brains of the operation, controlling LEDs mounted inside the arms themselves. Using a dedicated controller makes working with addressable LEDs a cinch. As a further bonus, the board serves up a web interface, allowing patterns to be changed without having to hook up a cable to the device. Meanwhile, a sensor board inside the arms uses a microphone to enable the light show to react to sound and music.

It’s one of the more obscure uses for an old mannequin, but definitely one that appeals to our love of everything that flickers and glows. It’s a build very much up [Emily’s] alley; as a prolific maker, she loves to build weird and wonderful creations, as shared during her talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference. Video after the break.

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Rocking Out On A Limb With LE STRUM

May 23, 2020 by Sven Gregori 8 Comments

It’s hard to imagine 80s Synth-pop without the keytar, and yet this majestic Centaur of a musical instrument rarely gets much love, and their players are often the target of ridicule. It almost seems as if being hung around the neck should be a privilege solely reserved for stringed instruments. Well, [midierror] has at least that part somewhat right then, with the Full On MIDI Leg that is guaranteed to make every keytarist look like a prestigious cellist in comparison.

What looks like the 1987 movie Mannequin taking a dark, Mengelesque turn, is as awesome as it is bizarre, thanks to building the concept of the LE STRUM into, well, a leg. LE STRUM itself is an open source MIDI instrument built by [Jason Hotchkiss], who describes it as “a cross between a Stylophone and an Omnichord”. It consists of a set of buttons to select different combinations of chords, that can than be strummed by scratching an attached stylus over an array of contact pads. However, [midierror], who also distributes a pre-assembled version of the LE STRUM, uses strings instead of contact pads, and a pick for the actual strumming, turning this into a close-enough string instrument.

The only thing missing now is a functioning knee joint, and maybe some inspiration from this MIDI-controlled concertina, and we’d be ready to revolutionize the accordion world with the, uhm, kneetar? And since it’s built around a PIC16, this thigh-slapper won’t even cost you an ARM, just the leg — but enough already with these toe-curling puns.

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IMU Boards As Next-gen Motion Capture Suit?

August 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

This guy takes a drink and so does the virtual wooden mannequin. Well, its arm takes a drink because that’s all the researchers implemented during this summer project. But the demo really makes us think that suits full of IMU boards are the next generation of motion capture. Not because this is the first time we’ve seen it (the idea has been floating around for a couple of years) but because the sensor chips have gained incredible precision while dropping to bargain basement prices. We can pretty much thank the smartphone industry for that, right?

Check out the test subject’s wrist. That’s an elastic bandage which holds the board in place. There’s another one on this upper arm that is obscured by his shirt sleeve. The two of these are enough to provide accurate position feedback in order to make the virtual model move. In this case the sensor data is streamed to a computer over Bluetooth where a Processing script maps it to the virtual model. But we’ve seen similar 9-axis sensors in projects like this BeagleBone sensor cape. It makes us think it would be easy to have an embedded system like that on the back of a suit which collects data from sensor boards all over the test subject’s body.

Oh who are we kidding? [James Cameron’s] probably already been using this for years.

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A Mannequin Head + Arduino + Webcam = Lots Of Creepy Fun!

March 14, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 5 Comments

This mannequin head was purchased years ago on sale for less than $3. As with many things one sees while shopping, it didn’t have a purpose at the time, but seemed like it would be useful later. Add in an Arduino, some servos, and electronics parts that were acquire in a similar manner, and you have all the ingredients needed for a cool hack.

The build is well documented in the video after the break, and we especially like at 2:24 when who we suppose is the mom says “Look at this mess!” Apparently the next iteration will be a robot to clean everything up!

This iteration is quite impressive though, as it uses a webcam to track objects using a servomotor and lists the code used. For a view of it tracking stuff along with a view of the PC, fast forward to around 8:45. In addition to tracking the parts using the servo, the non-webcam eye changes color from green to yellow depending on if it’s tracking or not. It also featured a blinking necklace, which is also a plus in our eyes.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TithLO3KzzU&w=470&h=315%5D

For more random head-like creepiness, be sure to check out [Boxie the Creepster]!