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…
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 
Back 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 
Say 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.
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 