Making A Kit-Kat Clock Even Creepier

December 19, 2023 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

If there’s anything as American as baseball and apple pie, it’s gotta be the Kit-Kat clock in the kitchen. For the unfamiliar, the Kit-Kat clock is special in that its pendulum tail and eyes move back and forth with each passing second. They’re equal parts cute and creepy.

But not this particular Kit-Kat, not once [Becky Stern] got a hold of it. The cute/creepy scales have been tipped, because the eyes of this Kat follow you around the room. “You” in this case is fellow maker [Xyla Foxlin], whom [Becky] drew in the Maker Secret Santa pool. See, [Xyla] loves cats, but is deathly allergic to them. So really, what better gift is there?

In order to make this happen, [Becky] started by disconnecting the long lever that link the eyes and the tail, which move together, and connected a servo horn to the eyes. [Becky] drilled out the nose in order to fit the camera, which is connected to a Seeed Grove AI Vision board with a Xiao RP2040 piggybacked on top.

While soldering on the servo wires, [Becky] accidentally detached a tiny capacitor from the AI Vision board, but it turns out that it wasn’t critical. Although she only had to write one line of code to get it to work, it ended up working too well, with the eyes darting around really quickly. By making the servo move in timed increments to the new positions, it’s now much more creepy. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

You know we can’t resist a clock build around here, especially when those clocks are binary.

Continue reading “Making A Kit-Kat Clock Even Creepier” →

Single-piece Tank Chassis Goes Robotic

November 27, 2023 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

[EXTREME3DPRINT] has a new version of their print-in-place tank chassis: the PiPBOT now accepts drop-in motors (in the form of 360° rotation servos), RC receiver, and battery pack to make a functional RC tank platform in no time flat. The design is entirely 3D printed with no supports needed.

This new version is a paid 3D model (and it includes STEP files, thankfully) but the original proof-of-concept print-in-place tank chassis is free and remains a highly clever piece of design that really shows off what is possible when one plays to a 3D printer’s strengths.

A better look at the design’s details can be found on the designer’s website, and a short video demonstrating assembly and operation is embedded below. We particularly like the attachment points on the top of the PiPBOT, which allows for securely mounting all kinds of customized payloads.

Interested in this style of printable RC platform, but want something a little more accessible? If race cars are more your thing, we’d like to also mention the Gamma 2.0 by [Under Engineered]. It’s a print-in-place RC car that needs minimal parts to get rolling and would make an excellent afternoon project.

Continue reading “Single-piece Tank Chassis Goes Robotic” →

Robot Sunflower Follows The Sun

November 3, 2023 by Al Williams 15 Comments

Real flowers do it, and even the Beatles did it. [Robo Hub] now has a plastic sunflower that tracks the sun using, of course, an Arduino. It may not qualify as a real robot, but it does mimic a real sunflower. The electronics aren’t earth-shattering, of course. An Arduino, a light sensor, and a servo motor are all you really need. But we enjoyed the whimsy and the artistic sensibility. This would be a great school project, for example. Interesting enough to get kids interested but not so hard as to be undoable. You can see a video of the ersatz flower below.

There are actually a pair of light sensors, as you might expect. That way you can determine which sensor is getting the most light. Obviously, these can’t be on-off sensors. They are, in fact, light-dependent resistors, so you get a nice analog reading.

Of course, you might not need an Arduino for this. A 555 driving a servo and a handful of discrete components could measure a bridge with the photoresistors and get the same effect. On the other hand, a microcontroller these days is inexpensive and versatile, so why not?

Usually, people tracking the sun are trying to get more energy. That doesn’t have to be any more complicated, though.

Continue reading “Robot Sunflower Follows The Sun” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Hack Skellington Is The Life Of The Party

October 29, 2023 by Kristina Panos No comments

[Matt Vella] has had a talking, non-posable skeleton knocking around for years. As cool as that sounds, [Matt] is really tired of its three stock phrases. Fast forward to this year — [Matt] got a posable skeleton and decided to go all out on this, the hackiest of all holidays. The result? Hack Skellington.

Between the eye socket-mounted camera, the speaker, and servos in the head, jaw, and one arm, Hack Skellington is decked out to scare trick-or-treaters (or anyone who gets close enough) in modern fashion. Thanks to ChatGPT and an AI-generated voice, Hack can recognize people and welcome them by name, look people in the eye, or simply move its arm when someone gets too close.

The brains of this operation is a Radxa Zero SBC programmed in Viam, though any SBC with Wi-Fi, GPIO, I²C, and USB should work just fine. [Matt] only spent about $150 total, half of which went to the skeleton itself. Be sure to check the spooky action out after the break.

You have until 9 AM PT on Tuesday, October 31st to enter the 2023 Halloween Hackfest. Procrastinators unite! Don’t want to animate a whole skeleton? Come to think of it, a severed, animated hand is even creepier, anyway.

Continue reading “2023 Halloween Hackfest: Hack Skellington Is The Life Of The Party” →

Commodore Datassette Does Barbershop Quartet

October 20, 2023 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Okay, now this is just plain fun. [Linus Åkesson] modified a Commodore Datassette player to move its “mouth” and, when quadrupled, sing a clever barbershop tune called “Sweet End of Line” that’s a play on “Sweet Adeline“, a top hit from the summer of 1903.

What? Let us explain. Those with Commodore 64s who lacked disk drives often had the Datassette — a magnetic storage tape device, or cassette player used to load and save files. But they couldn’t open the doors themselves with a keypress, and they certainly couldn’t sing barbershop.

First off, [Linus] redirected the current that drives the magnetizing tape head through a speaker coil instead. Then he replaced the motor with a servo that opens the lid from the inside. A simple rubber band pulls the lid back shut. Software-wise, [Linus] is using a timer interrupt to run code that toggles the output signal, the rate of which determines the pitch.

Don’t worry — all of these modifications are reversible, so no Datassettes were truly harmed in the making. Don’t forget to check out the brief build/demo video after the break.

We’ve seen our share of tape players, but we’d never seen one with a crank until recently.

Continue reading “Commodore Datassette Does Barbershop Quartet” →

Teaching A Mini-Tesla To Steer Itself

September 2, 2023 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

At the risk of stating the obvious, even when you’ve got unlimited resources and access to the best engineering minds, self-driving cars are hard. Building a multi-ton guided missile that can handle the chaotic environment of rush-hour traffic without killing someone is a challenge, to say the least. So if you’re looking to get into the autonomous car game, perhaps it’s best to start small.

If [Austin Blake]’s fun-sized Tesla go-kart looks familiar, it’s probably because we covered the Teskart back when he whipped up this little demon of an EV from a Radio Flyer toy. Adding self-driving to the kart is a natural next step, so [Austin] set off on a journey into machine learning to make it happen. Having settled on behavioral cloning, which trains a model to replicate a behavior by showing it examples of the behavior, he built a bolt-on frame to hold a steering servo made from an electric wheelchair motor, some drive electronics, and a webcam attached to a laptop. Ten or so human-piloted laps around a walking path at a park resulted in a 48,000-image training set, along with the steering wheel angle at each point.

The first go-around wasn’t so great, with the Teskart seemingly bent on going off the track. [Austin] retooled by adding two more webcams, to get a little parallax data and hopefully improve the training data. After a bug fix, the improved model really seemed to do the trick, with the Teskart pretty much keeping in its lane around the track, no matter how fast [Austin] pushed it. Check out the video below to see the Teskart in action.

It’s important to note that this isn’t even close to “Full Self-Driving.” The only thing being controlled is the steering angle; [Austin] is controlling the throttle himself and generally acting as the safety driver should the car veer off course, which it tends to do at one particular junction. But it’s a great first step, and we’re looking forward to further development.

Continue reading “Teaching A Mini-Tesla To Steer Itself” →

Hackaday Prize 2023: Tilting Mechanical Panels Make A Beautiful Display

July 17, 2023 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

Mechanical displays use a variety of different methods to represent data with physical objects, and [AIRPOCKET]’s Mechanical Display aims to be a platform anyone can use. Each “pixel” in this display is a panel of some kind, and different effects can be had by moving individual panels to different angles. Not only can images be represented, but the patterns of the movements themselves can be beautiful as well.

The panels are an important part of how the display presents, so the design makes them easy to change out.

These sorts of displays are fertile ground for artistic expression (one memorable implementation of this basic idea was the wooden mirror, which used varnished tiles of wood) but anyone looking to use the concept has usually been on their own when it comes to implementation.

The idea [AIRPOCKET] has is to make this kind of installation easier to implement. This method uses economical mini RC servos and 3D-printed pieces to create modular segments that can be assembled into whatever configuration one may need.

The material of the panels matters, too. Just below the page break, you can see a large unit with each “pixel” consisting of a mirrored square that reflects daylight. There’s also a video of an earlier prototype that uses some ridged two-color pieces to create a simple 4×4 three-level greyscale display.

There are a lot of possibilities if [AIRPOCKET] can make this sort of display more easily accessible, and that makes it a contender in the 2023 Hackaday Prize.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: Tilting Mechanical Panels Make A Beautiful Display” →