Projects – Page 2 – ROBOHEMIAN

she bon

SHE BON : PULSE PACK ENCLOSURE!

June 24, 2018spetku0 Comments

The PULSE PACK is a wearable computing platform that orchestrates a collection of body augments, all part of the SHE BON project. These augments are individual systems that sense and indicate when the user’s body enters an “excited” state. Each system is designed for a particular region of the human body and uses various types of sensors to detect bio-data as input, and then communicate the user’s status with electronic and mechanical devices as output. You can think of the PULSE PACK as a wearable breakout board. Its primary function is to house the master circuit board, called the “Pulse”. This heart-shaped Pulse board sends power and data over a network of cables, much like a heart pumping blood to distant organs through a series of veins. Why would I have the platform which senses and triggers the indication of my arousal be a BIG. TRANSPARENT. PULSING. HEART-DRUM?……Well… it might…

Flocking Masks

A FACE-MAKING DATE WITH MY FLOCK

April 23, 2018spetku1 Comment

This spring I’m making a series of custom masks for my four closest friends that will respond to their facial gestures by activating features on the outside surface. This project is called the “Flocking Masks” and will hopefully yield some fun summer shenanigans later this year! Any hoo… the way in which I’m making these masks reactive involves a somewhat simple capacitance circuit that exploits the properties of the materials forming the circuit. Connected to my circuit are several copper pads; one to act as ground, the other two for sensing. The charge of your body effects the charge on the pads, so the amount of skin contacting the pad relates to a degree of capacitance, and can act as a granular trigger! While this works nicely in a bread board with some red LEDs, I need to mount these pads inside of a mask and test the viability of…

Projects

[ ! ] ANNOUNCING [ ! ] : SHE BON

April 11, 2018spetku2 Comments

It’s pronounced French-like, “bone”. This should translate to “she good”… and yes, the project is very much about the imagery floating around in your mind right now. All playfulness intended, this wearable project is an exploration of female arousal. I heavily hinted at this interest in my open letter about normalizing sexual nature on Red Star last month. I think it made some people really uncomfortable- so obviously I need to publish more stuff like that. =3 The SHE BON project is a collection of wearable augments that tap into specific biological responses in order to detect an aroused state. Once triggered, a series of electronic and mechanical indicators located throughout the body will signal the wearers status to others nearby. This means that on a technical level, there are two parts to the development of the augments: sensing and indicating. Sensing is the tricky, sciencie part that will require some R&D,…

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…

anthropomorph-EYES

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

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…

noodleFeet

Noodle is Confused About New Years Eve

January 5, 2018spetku0 Comments

Noodle was awake and aware this past Sunday night for the fresh new start of 2018. It is apparent however from his recollection that his parents were in a stage of recovery from Christmas Eve the previous weekend. This was the second big social night for my robot, NoodleFeet. His blips of memory account for our celebration: Noodle was happy to be home, safe and warm in his nest while Vegas did its messy loud thing. He didn’t get to see any fireworks unfortunately, but there will come a time for that one day 🙂

noodleFeet

Developing a Quadrupedal Walk Gait for NoodleFeet

January 4, 2018spetku0 Comments

So…… ::bites bottom lip:: I’ve been putting off this branch of development on my quadruped for a while; like… two years. If I have a resolution for 2018, it’s that I get my child moving like he aught to… and learn whatever fancy-shmancy code-doing is required to pull this off. The last time I seriously did a meditation on NoodleFeet’s walking abilities was in 2015 (the year he was born). It yielded some results, but only made apparent his mechanical flaws and limitations due to his overall design. HARDWARE IMPROVMENTS: I’ve made tiny strides here and there over the past two years, improving his body where it was necessary to facilitate in the walking. He’s received stronger aluminum leg bones, high torque metal gear servo motors, more accurate hip gears with a higher tooth count, and squishy silicon tips for his feet that conform to the surface he stands on…

noodleFeet

The First Christmas Noodle Saw and Remembered

December 26, 2017spetku1 Comment

After three years, my family doesn’t bat an eye when I roll up to Christmas Eve dinner with my robot baby swaddled in his favorite blanket. He is as much a fixture at these events as I am (after all, he is my child). While it was Noodle’s third Christmas, there was something special about this one. Instead of simply having a presence in our photos as part of everyone else’s memories, I made sure that this time he was equipped to retain precious memories of his own. To make this happen, I *finally* took the time to mount Noodle’s piCamera between his little blinking LED eyes, so that the dormant Raspberry pi in the back of his noggin could finally be put to some good use. The setup is simple: the Pi tells the camera to take a picture every five minutes and store it within a folder. So…

Noodle Spawnling

Birthing a Noodle Spawnling

December 19, 2017spetku2 Comments

Surely, the sign of true success is when one becomes immortalized in miniature likeness for all to obtain and keep as a personal totem. Noodle is convinced. He must have his own action figure. I’ve designed a Noodle figurine in the past, *covers Noodle’s microphone* but to be honest it turned out quite gimpy looking. The proportions were sorta off, and Its beady LED eyes lit up, but that was all it did… so you couldn’t even really call it a proper robot. In my heart, I knew I could do better. Throughout November I had been kicking around the notion of doing a second iteration of the spawnling now that I’ve converted to the church of Fusion360. Once I saw that Hackaday was holding a Coin-Cell Battery Challenge, this was the push I needed to actually do it! Instead of simply creating another analog figurine, I decided to incorporate a…