Planet Arduino

[Sergey Mironov] sent in his SelfieBot project. His company, Endurance Robots, sells a commercial version of the bot, which leads us to believe that in a strange and maybe brilliant move he decided to just sell the prototype stage of the product development as a kit. Since he also gave away the firmware, STLs, BOM, and made a guide so anyone can build it, we’re not complaining.

The bot is simple enough. Nicely housed hobby servos in a 3D printed case take care of the pan and tilt of the camera. The base of the bot encloses the electronics, which are an Arduino nano, a Bluetooth module, and the support electronics for power and motor driving.

To perform the face tracking, the build assumes you have a second phone. This is silly, but isn’t so unreasonable. Most people who’ve had a smart phone for a few years have a spare one living in a drawer as back-up. One phone runs the face tracking software and points the bot, via Bluetooth, towards the user. The other phone records the video.

The bot is pretty jumpy in the example video, but this can be taken care of with better motors. For a proof-of-concept, it works. A video of it in action after the break.

Selfie Plant is an interactive installation taking pictures of itself using Arduino Yún, Facebook Graph APIs and then uploads them to Facebook. It was developed by a group of students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design during “The secret life of objects” course held also by Arduino.cc team. The final prototype was placed in the exhibition of the school, to see the interaction of the audience with it and you can see the result on Facebook.

The Selfie Plant is an attempt to provoke some thoughts above genre of expression. The Selfie Plant expresses itself in the form of nice-looking selfies, which it clicks according to its mood, weather or occasion. It mimics human behaviour, by giving it’s best pose and adjusting the camera angle to take the perfect selfie.

In the documentation on Github you can find all the details of the project composed by an Arduino Yún, controlling 2 servo motors and adjusting the positions of the plant and the camera stick; a python script (facebook.py) which communicates with Facebook’s graph API to post the captured photos on plant’s Facebook profile. In addition you’ll need also a LED Matrix, a Bread Board and 5 Volt Battery.

Here’s a preview of the diagram: