A Robotic Wheatley Replica created by Evie Bee

Robotic Wheatley From Portal 2

November 30, 2015 by Eric Evenchick 7 Comments

It’s been over 4 years since Portal 2 launched, but Wheatley, the AI character with a British accent, remains a captivating character. [Evie Bee] built a Wheatley replica complete with sound, movement, and one glowing eye.

The body of Wheatley is made out of blue insulation foam, also called XPS foam, laminated together with UHU Polyurethane glue. This formed a sphere, which was then cut into a detailed body. Papier mache clay was used to strengthen the thin foam.

The electronics for this build provide light, motion, and sound. The eye is moved by a total of 3 Arduino controlled servos: two for the movement of the eye, and one to allow it to open and close. Movement is controlled by two joysticks. Sound is provided by the Adafruit Sound Board, which connects to a speaker and a Velleman Sound to Light Kit. This kit controls the LEDs that light the eye, making it react to the voice of Wheatley.

You can watch this Wheatley rant at you after the break. Of course if you’re going to have a Wheatley you need a GLaDOS potato as well.

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Hand-Machined Companion Cube Can Be Destroyed And Rebuilt

November 15, 2014 by Theodora Fabio 7 Comments

[Michael Gainer] is a big fan of Portal, and it shows in the Weighted Companion Cube he made. [Michael] hand-machined the many pieces that comprise the Cube’s body and medallions out of 6061 aluminum. Dykem was used to transfer the marks for accurate machining, and the color is powder-coated to a heat tolerance of 400F. A CNC was used to make the distinctive hearts. [Michael] notes the irony was “very Portal” in having them cut by a heartless machine when everything else was done manually. The attention to detail is striking, the level of design more so when [Michael] proceeds to incinerate the poor Companion Cube with a brush burner. In the video shown at the link above, the Cube falls apart as the glue holding it together melts. When all is said and done, just grab more glue to bring that Cube back to its six-sided glory. Repeat to your heart’s content. Huge success! We have to be honest, after seeing all those pieces, we aren’t sure we’d want to do this very often. Companion Cubes have been featured in various iterations on Hackaday before, but they were never built with the idea of repeatedly destroying and rebuilding them. This novel take would make GlaDOS proud.

[Michael] has plans to put an Android device inside it with some light and temperature sensors. He wants to give it a voice resembling Portal’s turrets so it can whine when it needs to be charged or scream when it’s too hot or cold. He dubs this next project the “Overly Attached Weighted Companion Cube.” It wouldn’t be a good idea to incinerate this upcoming version, though we’d probably be inclined to if it demanded so much of our attention!

3D Printed Portal Turret Searches And Destroys

June 12, 2014 by James Hobson 11 Comments

Ah yes, Portal — one of the most iconic puzzle games from this past decade by Valve. [Yvo] just put the finishing touches on his fully 3D printed, working, Portal Turret. Well — it doesn’t have guns — but it does just about everything else!

This intricate prop replica has attention to detail written all over it. [Yvo’s] carefully designed it to actuate as close to the video game model as possible. Its eye and arms move, has a targeting laser and even features a camera for color based object tracking. You can also play around with it using a joystick — but it’s much more fun to leave on autonomous mode.

Because the whole thing is 3D printed, [Yvo] has also made up an Instructable for making your own, and according to him, it’s not that hard to build! This isn’t his first rodeo either, if you remember the awesome GlaDOS we shared last year — that’s his too.

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Sci-Fi Contest Roundup: The Valve Universe

April 21, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

While most of the entries to our Sci-Fi contest come from movies and TV shows, a select few are based on the Valve universe, including a few builds based on Portal and Team Fortress 2.

Deadly neurotoxin

Who wouldn’t want a gigantic articulated sociopathic robot hanging around? Two groups are building a clone of GLaDOs from the Portal series. and already the builds look really great.

[AmarOk], developed an open-source personal assistant called RORI that intends to be a more helpful version of GLaDOs, without all the testing and killing. He, along with [Peterb0y] and [n0m1s] are turning this personal assistant software into a GLaDOs replica.

Taking a slightly different tack, [Eric] and [jjyacovelli] built a GLaDOs-like robot with a camera in the ‘face’. This camera connects to a Google Glass and tracks the user’s head movements. There’s also a Nerf gun attached to the end of the robot body, triggered by double winking. Yep, it’s a heads-up display GLaDOs, perfect for punishing your test subjects.

Heavy load comin’ through!

Sentry

Not to be out done by a malevolent, hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence, [Tyler] and [Ryan] are building the cutest gat’ dern weapon in all of west Texas. It’s the level one sentry from Team Fortress 2, and the guys are turning one into a paintball sentry.

The TF2 sentry is a cute little bugger capable of motion tracking and perimeter defense, filling enemies with lead should they ever come too close.

While the end result probably won’t be as large or as heavy as the “official” real-life turret, a smaller table-top sized model is probably a little more practical. Even if it doesn’t live up to expectations, upgrading the sentry is simply a matter of whacking it with a wrench a few times.

There’s still time for you to cobble together an awesome Sci-Fi project and have a chance to win some awesome prizes.

Sci-Fi Contest: Source Universe Roundup

April 4, 2014 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

sci-fi-contest-universe-roundup

The Hackaday Sci-Fi contest has 36 entries so far. Since there are fifteen prizes available, you stand an excellent chance of winning; but you can’t win if you don’t play. It’s pretty easy to be considered for the contest. You simply need to hack together something Sci-Fi related and show off your work. Head over to the contest page and check out the details. Ten of the prizes are popularity-based, so posting early is the best bet! For those that were put-off by the team requirement, there’s a hack to get around that.

Since this is a themed contest we thought we’d give you an update on where inspiration is coming from. Below is the break-down of each Sci-Fi universe that has been so-far adopted by the entrants. We’d like to point out that this isn’t limited to movies, as the bulk of inspiration is to be found in literature. Why don’t we get a comment thread going here to help brain-storm for people who want help locking onto an idea?

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the banner images. These were taken from three of the contest projects. The upper left is a GLaDOS replica controlled by Google Glass (complete with Nerf dart gun) inspired by Portal. Bottom left is a pair of Peril-Sensitive sunglasses inspired by A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And the bottom right is a life-sign scanner inpired by Stargate Atlantis.

Unknown (genre or misc themes) 9
A Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy 4
Back to the Future 3
Star Wars 3
2001 A Space Odyssey 2
Doctor Who 2
Stargate 2
Thor 2
Blade Runner 1
Demolition Man 1
ET: The Extra Terrestrial 1
Futurama 1
Harry Potter 1
Knight Rider 1
Portal 1
Prometheus 1
Start Trek 1

SoundCube: A Companion Cube That Can Talk

February 23, 2014 by Marsh 2 Comments

sound_companionCube

The Enrichment Center likely disapproves of the SoundCube: a portal music box in the form of a Portal Companion Cube. [Andreas] finished this project a couple of years ago, but we’re glad he’s finally had time to give a rundown on the details at his blog.

The build is primarily a modified speaker box cube—constructed out of what appears to be MDF—with four Alpine SXE-1725S speakers placed at the center of the middle faces. The faces were routed out to resembled the Companion Cube, while the electronics mount and the speaker grills were 3d printed. Inside is a homemade amplifier built around an Arduino Mega, with a TDA7560 quad bridge amplifier, a TDA7318 audio processor, a Belkin bluetooth receiver, and a 3.5″ touchscreen for volume control and for input selections.

Two 12v 7.2Ah lead-acid batteries keep the cube functional for an entire weekend of partying, but probably add a few pounds to the already hefty MDF construction. Check out [Andreas’s] blog for more pictures and his GitHub for all the necessary code.

Can You Believe This Portal Gun Was Built From Scratch?

October 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

This Portal gun will really make [aNoodleJMC’s] costume pop this year. She actually built the video game weapon replica from scratch. It even includes some electronics to light it up blue or orange depending on which portal she’s planning to fire at an available flat surface.

There’s a lot of parts that went into the project, but by far our favorite one on the list is an acrylic toilet plunger. Its handle serves as a light pipe for the colored LEDs and can be seen above as a cloudy rod at the center of the clear barrel. A 4″ and 3″ PVC pipe helped to form the rest of the barrel, along with a 3″ clear acrylic pipe for the transparent areas. The bulbous parts of the body were sculpted from florist’s foam. Once she had all of the parts roughed out it’s obvious that [aNoodleJMC] spent a ton of time filling problem areas with Bondo, sanding everything smooth, and giving it a paint job she can be proud of. We hope she didn’t forget to include GLaDOS in the fun.

We actually just bought our Portal gun. But that’s because we had the big plans of adding the ability to levitate objects.

[vai reddit]