UPDATE: featured on GIZMODO,ENGADGET and MAKE!

Finally, my finalized prototype of SOBEaR, the responsible robot bartender.

SOBEaR is a robot friend for anyone who does not know their own limits, or has problems controlling themselves.
When you press the “breathe + pour” button on his right foot, the status light goes solid, and the user breathes into SOBEaR’s face. You can see the alcohol sensor above the bowtie, under his chin. Your current blood alcohol content (BAC) is then shown a scale from 1 – 6 with green, yellow, and red LEDs in SOBEaR’s chest. Depending on how drunk you are (or aren’t) SOBEaR will pour you a drink appropriate for your current state. In the video below, SOBEaR is pouring cranberry vodkas for my user tester. Two servos hold the alcohol and the mixer, and with the SoftwareServo library for arduino, programming this aspect was simple.

For many obvious reasons, I used a MapDuino which is an ATmega168 chip soldered into a custom PCB circuit (started with perfboard from radiocrack) for the brains of this robot. The alcohol sensor was super easy to implement, got it from sparkfun via my computation studio.

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The Morning Monster is a plush electronic alarm clock. He has all of the normal alarm functions, set time, set alarm, snooze, etc. However, what makes him a monster is his ability to shine the sun on your face when the alarm goes off by opening the blinds. The blinds are also manually controlled my moving his left arm up and down and he will never over-crank them!

The code implements Rob Faludi’s open source Arduino clock project, and he made a post on his blog. The wireless controller uses a mapduino circuit.

The video gives an explanation and demonstration of how it works.

This battery powered electronic musical instrument is a descendant of the theremin and can be played without contact from the musician. This small instrument contains two infared (IR) sensors that measure proximity. One sensor controls the note, while the other controls the octave that is played through the speaker in the front. The tone is reflected by one of seven colors that illuminates the center area and highlights a small indicator located on the top panel. Check out the video.

Theremin Style Instrument from Nick Hardeman on Vimeo.

I have posted the source code, some videos and pics as well, check out the original post.

Last week I posted my project, the Spatialized Umbrella v01. 5 speakers and LEDs are mounted inside of the umbrella, around the users’ head, allowing for sound and light spatialization. The ‘raindrop’ samples play in a loop, each speaker playing their own unique raindrop. The LEDs light up the speaker playing at that moment. The tempo of the loop is controlled by a long-range Sharp Infrared range finder. The closer an object is to you, the faster the loop plays. If an object is close enough and a threshold is reached, a lightning sequence is triggered. Best part: COMPLETELY SAFE FOR USE IN THE RAIN.

I absolutely could not fit an entire Arduino in the canopy of the umbrella, especially because I need it to be able to close if I wanted this project to be viable at all. This (as well as cost) was the reason I chose to use a MapDuino for this application. Here are some images, in this form, I soldered a 28-pin IC socket to the PCB (bare, from radioshack) as well as the rest of the circuit, completely contained on the one board measuring less than half the size of a full Arduino board.

About one week ago, the very first version of the MapDuino (read: Remapped Arduino) was put together.  Fully functional, fully breadboarded, fully efficient, and fully CHEAPER. Here I’ve uploaded code that takes data from a SharpIR rangefinder and fades R,G, and B values of a tri-color LED.  more info soon…