Teaching the StarBot to sing

My adventure with StarBots started in 2012 when I visited the first Orlando Mini Maker Faire and saw Pat Starace’s fantastic animatronic creations on display. The singing display was very impressive and was easily one of my favorite displays at the event. Luckily, Pat has branched out into making animatronic kits after a very successful Kickstarter and I’m happy to say that the kit is quite a lot of fun.

The StarBot kit is controlled simply enough by a Sparkfun Joystick Shield. This shield allows the eyes and mouth to be controlled in real time and also allows a sequence of controls to be recorded and played back afterwards. This was all great, but I wanted a way to programmatically trigger audio playback and have a way to synchronize movement of the eyes and mouth with the audio. After a bit of research, I decided to use the Adafruit Wave Shield for Arduino to accomplish this and it worked quite well. Continue reading…

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2013 Miami Mini Maker Faire

Miami Mini Maker Faire The first annual Miami Mini Maker Faire was this past Saturday at The LAB Miami and was a huge success, drawing over 1,700 attendees. Makers from across Florida were represented at the Faire and had fantastic projects on display. Afterwards, the Faire received great coverage in the press from the Miami Herald, The South Florida Business Journal and the official Makezine blog!
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Extra Life 2013

extralife2012_300x250Back in August of this year I saw a post on Reddit about an upcoming gaming charity event called Extra Life that caught my eye. The premise of Extra Life is simple: play games for 25 hours straight on November 2nd and raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network. When I mentioned all of this to my friends at The HackLab @ North Boynton, they enthusiastically offered to host the event in their new facility and we started scheming.
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2013 Orlando Mini Maker Faire: South Florida Makers Edition

Last Saturday marked the second annual Orlando Mini Maker Faire. I attended the first Orlando Mini Maker Faire last year and was immediately hooked after seeing all of the fascinating things on display (3D printers, robotics, art and technology) and the enthusiasm demonstrated by those at the Faire. Attending Orlando Faire in 2012 led to attending the NYC World Maker Faire and quickly deciding to become more involved with the Maker movement in South Florida.
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Orlando Mini Maker Faire back for a 2nd year!

The Orlando Mini Maker Faire has announced that it will be returning again this year at the Orlando Science Center on October 5th. If you are anywhere near Orlando in October, this should definitely be on your radar! If you didn’t make it last year and are curious to see what it was like, I have a video overview posted on Vimeo:


Orlando Maker Faire 2012 from Pierre Baillargeon on Vimeo.

The South Florida Hack & Tell group is planning to have a presence at the faire this year along with a number of local maker groups. If you have a project that you’d like to show off at the faire, please let me know!

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Bonnaroo Belt

#bonnaroo belt almost ready to go. It's kind of awesome. #arduino #adafruit

I was inspired to do this project after going to Bonnaroo for the first time last year. The idea I had was to take a programmable belt kit, hook it up to an Arduino microcontroller and microphone and make a wearable VU meter.
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How FourSquare helped me find an awesome goat

IMG_7157.JPGSay hello to Otis. Internet, Otis. Otis, Internet. Now that the introductions have been made, let me tell you the story of how FourSquare helped me find Otis the goat.

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So, you want to do some hacking with your kinect…

If you have read any technology blog in the past few months, chances are good that you have seen an ever increasing number of blog posts about people hacking their Xbox Kinect to do all kinds of really cool stuff. If you are like me, you found yourself thinking ‘I have got a really cool idea to do ________ with my Kinect, I should see what this is all about!’. Problem is, there is no definitive entry point to developing software using the Kinect.
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Help! My air hockey table grew a robot arm!

AirHockeyproject Four blog posts later and we’ve arrived at the last nostalgia blog post in the series. Ready for the story about the air hockey table that grew a Lynxmotion robot arm and learned how to play? Great! In the fall of 2004, I signed up to take a Video Processing course as a follow-up to the Digital Image Processing (DIP) course I had taken with Dr. Oge Marques (BlogTwitter). As with the DIP course, the Video Processing coursework included a term project of our choosing. I decided that it would be interesting to extend the functionality of the DIP project somehow but was not sure quite what to do. At some point along the way during the brainstorming, I remembered a robotic air hockey table I had seen when I was touring a college a few years back. That particular robotic air hockey table worked by using sensors embedded in the table surface to locate the puck as it moved and feeding that information to a robot arm. I decided to see if I could simply the idea by replacing the embedded sensors with a cheap USB web camera …

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The world’s least expensive pipetting robot

In 2005, as part of a graduate course on robotics, the team of Melissa Morris, John Morris, Thomas Kelly and I set about repurposing a JOT automation system (http://www.jotautomation.com/) which housed a four axis Hirata robot (http://www.hirata.it/) and was donated to FAU from Motorola. The system, pictured below, was originally used to print and apply barcodes in the battery compartment of cellular phones. The goal of the repurposing was to complete a project whereby the system would be converted into a pipetting robot, capable of dispensing liquids into 96-well microtiter plates. This was accomplished on an extremely lavish budget of $0.

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