Planet Arduino

There is no shame in taking advantage of a voice assistant device, like an Amazon Echo with Alexa. Those devices are useful and can add real convenience to your life. But they lack personality and any feeling of a soul—not just because of the stilted voices, but also because of the boring industrial designs intended for mass market appeal. To inject some life into his Amazon Echo, Workshop Nation turned it into a charming animatronic robot.

At its heart, this is still an Amazon Echo and it retains all of that functionality. But the Alexa brain now inhabits a body that looks like it was made by a wacky scientist from an ’80s movie featuring robot hijinks. It was cobbled together from salvaged parts, like an old CRT TV, as well as new components. It has 3D-printed animatronic eyes based on a design by Will Cogley and actuated by servo motors. Something akin to a voice waveform appears on the CRT whenever Alexa speaks, which works by using that signal voltage to drive one of the electron beam coils.

An Arduino Mega 2560 board controls the animatronics and also monitors a Useful Sensors Person Sensor. Its purpose is to direct the movement of the eyes to follow any people in the area. The Arduino also lets the users bypass the normal “Alexa” wake word so they can ask questions starting with whatever term they prefer. Those components (the bulk of which belong to the CRT) all attach to a frame made of laser-cut clear acrylic and threaded rods.

The result is a contraption that combines all of the convenience of a modern voice assistant with the aesthetic appeal of a science fair reject.

The post Amazon Echo becomes charming animatronic robot appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Like many of us, [Michael] needed a way to let the family know whether pants are required to enter the room — in other words, whenever a videoconference is in progress. Sure he could hang a do not disturb sign, but those are easy to forget. There’s no need to worry about forgetting to change status because this beautiful wall-mounted sign can be controlled with Alexa.

Inside the gorgeous box made from walnut, curly maple, and oak is an ESP32, some RGB LEDs, and three MOSFETs. [Michael] is using the fauxmoESP library to interface the ESP32 with Alexa, which emulates a Phillips Hue bulb for the sake of using a protocol she already knows. [Michael] can change the color and brightness percentage with voice commands.

The sign is set up as four different devices — one default, and one for each color. Since talking to Alexa isn’t always appropriate, [Michael] can also change the color of the LEDs using sliders on a website that’s served up by the ESP. Check out the full build video after the break.

Need something quick and dirty that works just as well? Our own [Bob Baddeley] made a status indicator that’s simple and effective.

animated GIFs work great and are very expressive

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The post The Peeqo Robot Communicates Using Only Animated GIFs appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

[Chris Grill] got his hands on a pet boa constrictor, which requires a fairly strict temperature controlled environment. Its enclosure needs to have a consistent temperature throughout, or the snake could have trouble regulating its body temperature. [Chris] wanted to keep tabs on the temp and grabbed a few TTF-103 thermistors and an Arduino Yun, which allowed him to log the temperature on each side of the enclosure. He used some code to get the temp reading to the linux side of an Arduino Yun, and then used jpgraph, a PHP graphing library, to display the results.

But that wasn’t good enough. Why not get a little fancy and have Amazon’s Echo read the temps back when you ask! Getting it setup was not so bad thanks to Amazon’s well documented steps to get custom commands set up.

He eventually lost the battle to get the Echo to talk to the web server on the Yun due to SSL issues, but he found an existing workaround by using a proxy.