What is Animatronic Beaker-bot? Well, the Beaker-bot is a animatronic puppet that will “sing” to the sound that I play through him. Meaning, If I hook up an iPod or other music playing device, he will lip-sync his mouth to the music or words. He is also a fully functional puppet with Beaker style head and hand control. He also has a electric button to control his animatronic mouth, and for fans of more classical puppetry, Beaker-bot does have a classic rod to control his mouth as well.
Beaker-bot, for me is both an excellent puppet for someone like me who does not have good enough puppetry voice skills to talk on my own. I also can have him on display, and he can talk and sing without a puppeteer, which is one of the major advantages of animatronics. I plan on having him on display during holidays such as Christmas.
I better mention right here that this is my first attempt at anything puppet or animatronic related. I am very happy with the results for my first try. I have no clue what the professionals use in their methods, and I am pretty sure that the methods I use are not the same as what is done professionally. That being said, the methods I used turned out very well for my needs.
Using an accelerometer and a handful of sensors, a team of Colorado State University students has created the Spatial Hand Remote. The gadget controls the flight of a remote control airplane through the sensors in a glove.
The movement of the plane follows the movement of the glove. As the hand in the glove tilts to the right or left, so does the plane. Sensors attached to fingers are used to control the throttle, roll reverse, and the on-off switch. The user’s hands control the plane like a maestro controling an orchestra.
HOUSTON – (May 7, 2013) – A group of Rice University mechanical engineering students are getting a charge out of having the coolest new shoes on campus.
As their capstone project that is required for graduation, four seniors created a way to extract and store energy with every step. Their PediPower shoes turn motion into juice for portable electronics and, perhaps someday, for life-preserving medical devices.
Heidi Hinder discusses her craft + technology residency at Watershed in Bristol, UK on Humans Invent:
The project focused on creating new ways of exchanging payment via physical gestures in an attempt to make technology a more interactive experience. It also served to promote physical contact with other humans in an age when the digital is replacing the tangible.
Hinder explains, “I was interested in trying to bring people closer together through technology and how that might be possible given that people are often quite isolated and absorbed by it, so I used technology as a mediation to bring back human to human interaction.”
Using RFID tags and readers, Hinder created four different physical gestures that could act as payment including hugging. In this scenario the customer and server wear an RFID tag and reader respectively on their tops and money is exchanged when these come into contact – the easiest way for this to happen is by hugging.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
It’s hard to beat classic episodes of “Sesame Street” for timeless, near-universal educational appeal, but engineer and Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried still saw an unmet need in the educational-video space. “We looked around and didn’t see an ‘Elmo for engineering’ or a kid’s show that celebrated science and engineering,” she tells Co.Design. “Every kid seems to have a cell phone or a tablet, but they know more about SpongeBob than how a LED works on the device or TV they’re watching, and we wanted to change that.” So she and her team at Adafruit created Circuit Playground, a Youtube series that combines chirpy puppets with hackery know-how. Here’s the first episode, “A is for Ampere”:
This is a Ghostbusters Trap and Proton Pack Plushy set that is modeled from the first Ghostbusters movie. They are both soft and squishy but will also hold their forms quite well.
The backpack straps on the pack are adjustable to fit a range of sizes and a strap is present on both plushies so they can easily be hung on the wall for decoration when not in use.
Incredible induction-powered LED engagement ring milled from titanium by Ben Kokes aka “Project Longhaul,” beautiful story!
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
As a 14-year-old Boy Scout who went on backpacking trips in western Massachusetts, Gihan Amarasiriwardena couldn’t find a fleece jacket that would protect him from the wind. His solution was to make his own wind-blocking coat from scratch, using plastic garbage bags, spray-on adhesive and fleece. Enlarge This Image Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times
Samples of bicycle-friendly apparel from Ministry of Supply. The company uses an aerospace design process to trace how the body’s skin moves.
Six years later, while riding his bike around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an engineering student, he realized he needed a dress shirt that could withstand the rigors of bicycle commuting. This time, he teamed up with a classmate and set out to make that missing item in the clothing market.
But they weren’t the only ones at M.I.T. to identify such a problem. Two students at its Sloan School of Management soon got together to develop their own version of work-appropriate clothing made with practical fabrics.
One was Kit Hickey, a former investment banker who had been frustrated that her Brooks Brothers suits were so stiff compared with her rock-climbing togs. The other was Aman Advani, now 28, who in his previous life as a management consultant had begun cutting the tubes from his dress socks and stitching them to the feet of his sports socks to build better footwear for his rigorous travel schedule.
The two groups, potential competitors, met each other at M.I.T.’s entrepreneur center in 2011. But instead of seeing each other as rivals, they decided to work together. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ I can’t believe we found each other,” Ms. Hickey, 28, says of the meeting.
“It was promising to know that there might actually be a market for this,” adds Mr. Amarasiriwardena, 24. By this time, he and his classmate Kevin Rustagi had started Ministry of Supply, a clothing business based in Boston that specializes in high-tech office apparel. Soon after the meeting, Ms. Hickey and Mr. Advani joined the company.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Tinky Winky is really an RGB LED on the rainbow spectrum but is proud to be lit up in purple. No question that TW is unique. TW is sometimes seen carrying around a Ruby the Red LED plushie companion. TW is on the talk circuit lecturing about electronics and can elaborate on resistors and tolerance. TW would like everyone to know that electronics is inclusive and fun..
Inspired from Adafruit’s circuit playground plushies and their show on the intarwebz to educate kids of all ages, if you are curious about how things work, watch and learn.
In real life and in this diverse maker community, I’ve run across all walks of life(no points yet). Yeah, some are strange. Some are different, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
To celebrate having good friends and if anyone needs an analogy to explain things like AC/DC to kids or if you are from a little town and never seen anything like this, make the puppet. And, Oh, it’s so darn cute.
A favorite webshow is Ask an Engineer hosted by Phil Torrone and Limor “Ladyada” Fried of Adafruit.It’s a weekly windup of maker world happenings, news, products and projects. Although the primary focus is on electronics, it showcases itself as a premier resource and business in the maker community. And it looks like they have fun at it…the reason this art imitates life.
Adafruit has the spirit of empowering everyone, especially young people into the field of electronics and computing. Their new webseries Circuit Playground is aimed at kids of all ages but hopefully it will also encourage more girls to be more representative in electrical engineering. So here is my mashup of Powerpuff Girls and Adafruit. I used to watch the cartoon with Caitlin when she was younger and it was something to spark the imagination(mad scientist dad, you know). Besides, Mojo JoJo was fun to say.
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