Matt commented on our Snap-O-Lantern kit:
I took the more DIY model and built a LEGO Snap-O-Lantern.
Category Archives: Engineering
Proximity activated Snap-o-Lantern
Gabe Hoffmann wrote in:
I heard you on Science Friday talking about halloween, went home and looked on your website at Snap-O-Lanterns, and was inspired. I added a phototransistor and infrared LEDs to make a motion sensing small pumpkin that can try to bite you.
Thanks for sharing your project, Gabe!
If you built a Snap-O-Lantern or were inspired by any of our Halloween projects, we’d love to see your photos in our flickr group.
Robots of BarBot 2013
Here are a few of the robots in attendance at BarBot 2013:
Schrödinger’s Martini, in which the amount of vermouth is indeterminate until box is opened and the drink observed.
Thinbot, pouring impeccably mixed drinks with style.
Manhattan Project and Mai Tai Project.
Outta Time, with a new LED lit control panel.
Tipsy Bot, using Legos to tip ingredients into your glass.
Our very own Drink Making Unit 2.1.
SW500 500SW (5:00 Somewhere) became affectionately known as Drink Drink Revolution or Dance Dance Intoxication. It judged your dancing skills and served you a drink thematically appropriate to your style.
Santa Barbot mixes drinks with super soaker components.
Not all the robots were serving drinks, and this lampshade-wearing robot seemed like it may have had a few too many.
No party is complete without R2D2, who wasn’t being used as a roving drink tray, since there were plenty of other robots to serve the humans.
Updated Nov. 9 to correct 500SW’s name.
Voronoi Pumpkins
We’re big fans of Voronoi diagrams, and use them in StippleGen so it’s awesome to see them in 3D printed pumpkins this Halloween season. Voronoi Pumpkin #1 shown above is available through Shapeways, along with the equally creatively named Voronoi Pumpkin #2. There’s also a Voronoi Jack-o-Lantern on Ponoko, and more even more Voronoi Pumpkins on Thingiverse.
The Art of Tinkering
We just got an advance copy of The Art of Tinkering, by our friends at the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium.
On their own, science, art, and technology all make for interesting, fun, and rewarding explorations. But when you mix them together, you get a veritable tinkering trifecta in which technological tools and scientific principles let you express your own artistic vision.
We flipped through the wonderful pictures and projects before we took it to the bench for some quick pictures. In the spirit of the book, we put it among a few tools and parts from recently photographed projects that were still on the table.
We found projects by some of our friends, including Ken Murphy, Jie Qi and AnnMarie Thomas. We’re excited that we have a few projects in the book, including our Circuitry Snacks, in a section on Surprising Circuits. The book itself incorporates some circuitry on the cover, which we hope to play with soon!
The book launch party will be at the Exploratorium Afterdark (ages 18+) event on November 7.
Barbot 2013 is almost here
BarBot, the premier cocktail robotics event, is this weekend, October 25-26 at the Odd Fellows Hall in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now (ages 21+ only).
We’ll be bringing Drink Making Unit 2.1, with its new vodka switch and peristaltic pump.
Tennis for Two build in Germany
Peter wrote in to share his build based on our Tennis for Two video game project.
He has more pictures up in his post.
Lady Ada Lovelace Day 2013
For Lady Ada Lovelace Day, we are once again celebrating women in open source hardware. Pictured above are three key women from the 2013 Open Hardware Summit: Catarina Mota, from the Open Source Business panel and OSHWA board member; Addie Wagenknecht, Open Hardware Summit co-Chair; and Alicia Gibb, conference organizer and OSHWA president.
A number of women also presented talks during the summit:
- Alice King, Open Source Funding
- Amanda Wozniak, Collective Innovation Enjoy The Mess
- Phoenix Perry, Embodied play design and building a female developer community
- Sophi Kravitz, Open source Products, Can you Profit?
- Becky Stern, Wearables at the intersection of electronics and craft
- Katherine Scott, SolidStatity Forever: Surviving as a Human in a Robotic World
- Mathilde Berchon, The State of Open Hardware Entrepreneurship in 2013
In addition, the following women presented posters or demos:
Toni Klopfenstein, Erin “RobotGrrl” Kennedy, Gabriella Levine, Analisa Russo, Amelia Marzec, Anuja Apte, Nadya Peek, Tania Morimoto, Ayah Bdeir, Linda Karina Duran Bautista, Aisen Caro Chacin, Pilar Zaragoza, Alexandra Shuey, Christalee Bieber.
All of these presenters build on a history of excellent content within this vibrant community.
Photo courtesy of the Open Hardware Summit (CC-BY).
Snap-O-Lantern Kit
Just in time for Halloween, we’re launching a Snap-O-Lantern kit. You can still build this robotic snapping pumpkin from scratch using our original instructions, or you can do it the easy way with this kit, which uses one of our ATtiny2313 target boards and has all the parts you’ll need— except the mini-pumpkin and three AA batteries.
We’re putting the full documentation for the kit on our wiki.
Maker Camp: Halloween Edition
Pumpkins are being featured today on a special Halloween edition of Maker Camp, and I’ll be there, showing our Snap-O-Lantern project. Tune in at 5 pm (Pacific), today, Thursday, October 10.
