March 2018 – ROBOHEMIAN

Flocking Masks

March 21, 2018spetku0 Comments

I grew up with a parrot. Over the course of my life, we taught one another how to communicate our feelings to each other using sounds, patterns of movement, and gesture. Now I have this rich private language with my bird. This makes sense, after all, birds distinguish who is in their flock by the familiar sounds they call out and repeat back to one another over a given distance. Birds that know the same head bob and chirp must be from your zip code, and are therefore your familiars. Your family. Your flock. Without noticing, over time I began enacting some of the mannerisms I’ve developed between me and my bird, with my human friends. I think most write off these acts as quirkiness, or ‘Sarah being Sarah’, but as I repeat them, invariably those who are closest to me begin mimicking these behaviors as well. As my closest…

Defining Personality and Emotions

March 15, 2018spetku0 Comments

If you just received a set of anthropomorphEYES in the mail and are jouncing to do something special with them *wink* – I will walk you through the process so you can create a personality for your appliance that is all its own. To reprogram your eye boards, you’ll need an AVR programmer of some flavor: …and a 2×3 segment of extended male pin headers: The shorter end of the pin header goes in the programmer’s cable doodad like so: This allows you the straddle a row of pins along the top and bottom of your eye board so that all of the pins make contact with the programming pads (the side of the cable with the red stripe should line up with the little arrow on the board): Once aligned properly, all you need do is pinch the headers to make firm contact with the board while you are…

Anthropomorph-EYEs Your Appliances!

March 7, 2018spetku0 Comments

I grew up watching the movie, “The Brave Little Toaster”, so as a child I believed the objects in my life were secretly alive. It was not because I lacked the intelligence to tell that a chunk of plastic and circuit boards didn’t possess the biological features which deem something to be living… I just simply *chose* to see that they were; in the face of the reality I knew and understood. As an adult, nothing has changed! This recognition of ‘self’ in the inanimate is still a big part of who I am, and ultimately what results in weekend projects like these sparkly expressive eyes. Now you too can give one of your kitchen or household friends their very own window to the soul, so they too can express emotions like you do. You can find my Anthropomorph-EYEs on my Tindie Store, Robohemian! They come in four different colors…