Turning GLaDOS Into Ted: A Tale Of A Talking Toy

January 14, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 7 Comments

What if your old, neglected toys could come to life — with a bit of sass? That’s exactly what [Binh] achieved when he transformed his sister’s worn-out teddy bear into ‘Ted’, an interactive talking plush with a personality of its own. This project, which combines the GLaDOS Personality Core project from the Portal series with clever microcontroller tinkering, brings a whole new personality to a childhood favorite.

[Binh] started with the basics: a teddy bear already equipped with buttons and speakers, which he overhauled with an ESP32 microcontroller. The bear’s personality originated from GLaDOS, but was rewritten by [Binh] to fit a cheeky, teddy-bear tone. With a few tweaks in the Python-based fork, [Binh] created threads to handle touch-based interaction. For example, the ESP32 detects where the bear is touched and sends this input to a modified neural network, which then generates a response. The bear can, for instance, call you out for holding his paw for too long or sarcastically plead for mercy. I hear you say ‘but that bear Ted could do a lot more!’ Well — maybe, all this is just what an innocent bear with a personality should be capable of.

Instead, let us imagine future iterations featuring capacitive touch sensors or accelerometers to detect movement. The project is simple, but showcases the potential for intelligent plush toys. It might raise some questions, too.

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Close-up of a woman's neck with a haptic patch

Hacking Haptics: The 19-Sensor Patch Bringing Touch To Life

November 18, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 14 Comments

On November 6th, Northwestern University introduced a groundbreaking leap in haptic technology, and it’s worth every bit of attention now, even two weeks later. Full details are in their original article. This innovation brings tactile feedback into the future with a hexagonal matrix of 19 mini actuators embedded in a flexible silicone mesh. It’s the stuff of dreams for hackers and tinkerers looking for the next big thing in wearables.

What makes this patch truly cutting-edge? First, it offers multi-dimensional feedback: pressure, vibration, and twisting sensations—imagine a wearable that can nudge or twist your skin instead of just buzzing. Unlike the simple, one-note “buzzers” of old devices, this setup adds depth and realism to interactions. For those in the VR community or anyone keen on building sensory experiences, this is a game changer.

But the real kicker is its energy management. The patch incorporates a ‘bistable’ mechanism, meaning it stays in two stable positions without continuous power, saving energy by recycling elastic energy stored in the skin. Think of it like a rubber band that snaps back and releases stored energy during operation. The result? Longer battery life and efficient power usage—perfect for tinkering with extended use cases.

And it’s not all fun and games (though VR fans should rejoice). This patch turns sensory substitution into practical tech for the visually impaired, using LiDAR data and Bluetooth to transmit surroundings into tactile feedback. It’s like a white cane but integrated with data-rich, spatial awareness feedback—a boost for accessibility.

Fancy more stories like this? Earlier this year, we wrote about these lightweight haptic gloves—for those who notice, featuring a similar hexagonal array of 19 sensors—a pattern for success? You can read the original article on TechXplore here.

Electroosmotic Haptics For More Tactile Touch Devices

May 2, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 18 Comments

If you’re like us, one of the appeals of retro tech is the tactile feedback you get from real buttons. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a new method for bringing haptic feedback to touchscreen devices.

Using an array of miniaturized electroosmotic pumps, the current prototype devices offer 5 mm of displacement from a 5 mm stackup which is a significant improvement over previous technologies which required a lot more hardware than the displacement provided. When placed under a flexible screen, notifications and other user interactions like the keyboard can raise and lower as desired.

Each layer is processed by laser before assembly and the finished device is self-contained, needing only electrical connections. No need for a series of tubes carrying fluid to make it work. Interaction surfaces have been able to scale from 2-10 mm in diameter with the current work, but do appear to be fixed based on the video (below the break).

You might find applications for haptics in VR or want to build your own Haptic Smart Knob.

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Tactile Feedback In VR, No Cumbersome Gloves Or Motors Required

April 26, 2023 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

This clever research from the University of Chicago’s Human Computer Integration Lab demonstrates a fascinating way to let users “feel” objects in VR, without anything getting in the way of using one’s hands and fingers normally. Certainly, the picture here shows hands with a device attached to them, but look closely and you’ll see that it’s on the back of the hand only.

There’s hardware attached to the hands, yes, but only to the backs. Hands and fingers can be used entirely normally while receiving tactile feedback.

The unique device consists of a control box, wires, and some electrodes attached to different spots on the back of the hand and fingers. Carefully modulated electrical signals create tactile sensations on the front, despite originating from electrodes on the back. While this has clear applications for VR, the team thinks the concept could also have applications in rehabilitation, or prosthetics.

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Learn To Play Guitar, Digitally

March 2, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Learning to play a musical instrument takes a major time commitment. If you happened to be stuck inside your home at any point in the last two years, though, you may have had the opportunity that [Dmitriy] had to pick up a guitar and learn to play. Rather than stick with a traditional guitar, though, [Dmitriy] opted to build his own digital guitar which is packed with all kinds of features you won’t find in any Fender or Gibson.

The physical body of this unique instrument is entirely designed by [Dmitriy] out of 3D printed parts, and uses capacitive touch sensors for each of the notes on what would have been the guitar’s fretboard. The strings are also replaced with a set of six switches that can be strummed like a regular guitar, and are used to register when to play a note. After a few prototypes, everything was wired onto a custom PCB. The software side of this project is impressive as well; it involved creating custom firmware to register all of the button presses and transmit the information to a MIDI controller so that the guitar can communicate digitally with anything that supports MIDI.

To finish off the project, [Dmitriy] also added a wireless device as well as some other bonus features like an accelerometer, which can be used to augment the sound of the guitar in any way he can think of to program them. It’s one of the most innovative guitars we’ve seen since the prototype Noli smart guitar was unveiled last year, and this one is also on its way from prototype to market right now.

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Guitar Pickguard Adds MIDI Capabilities

December 6, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 1 Comment

For a standard that has been in use since the 1980s, MIDI is still one of the most dominant forces on the musical scene even today. It’s fast, flexible, and offers a standard recognized industry-wide over many different types of electronic instruments. Even things which aren’t instruments can be turned into musical devices like the infamous banana keyboard via the magic of MIDI, and it also allows augmentation of standard instruments with other capabilities like this guitar with a MIDI interface built into the pick guard.

[Ezra] is the creator of this unique musical instrument which adds quite a few capabilities to his guitar. The setup is fairly straightforward: twelve wires run to the pick guard which are set up as capacitive sensors and correspond with a note on the chromatic scale. Instead of using touchpads, using wires allows him to bend away the “notes” that he doesn’t need for any particular piece of music. The wires are tied back to an Adafruit Feather 32u4 microcontroller behind the neck of the guitar which also has a few selectors for changing the way that the device creates tones. He can set the interface to emit single notes or continuously play notes, change the style, can change their octave, and plenty of other features as well.

One of the goals of this project was to increase a guitar player’s versatility when doing live performances, and we would have to agree that this gives a musician a much wider range of abilities without otherwise needing a lot of complex or expensive equipment on stage. We’ve seen a few other MIDI-based builds focused on live performances lately, too, like this one which allows a band to stay in sync with each other.

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Haptics Hack Chat With Nanoport Technology

April 5, 2021 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, April 7 at noon Pacific for the Haptics Hack Chat with Tim Szeto and Kyle Skippon!

Of all our senses, the sense of touch is perhaps the most underappreciated. We understand and accept the tragedy that attends loss of vision or hearing, and the impact on the quality of life resulting from olfactory and gustatory sensations can be severe. But for some reason, we don’t give a second thought to our sense of touch, which is indeed strange given that we are literally covered with touch sensors. That’s a bit of a shame, since touch can reveal so much about the world around us, and our emotional well-being is so tightly tied to the tactile senses that those deprived of it in infancy can be scarred for life.

Haptics is the technology of tactile feedback, which seeks to leverage the human need for tactile experiences to enrich the experience of dealing with the technological world. Haptic feedback devices are everywhere now, and have gone far beyond the simple off-balance motor used since the days when a pager was a status symbol. To help us sort out what’s new in the haptics world, Tim and Kyle from Nanoport Technology will stop by the Hack Chat. Nanoport is a company on the cutting edge of haptics, so they’ll have a wealth of details about what haptics are, where the field is going, and how you can start thinking about making touch a part of your projects.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, April 7 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
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