Planet Arduino

Infineon is one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, but the company is made up of regular people like any other. Many of those people just happen to be engineers and they like to build gadgets and gizmos like the rest of us. Following a water cooler discussion about who had the biggest 3D printer, the Infineon team decided to build this delightful XXL Chatbot to offer yuletide greetings.

The adorable robot was designed after the Infineon Chatbot avatar that offers virtual assistance on the Infineon website. While that internet Chatbot can respond to natural language questions, this XXL Chatbot can only emote through its animated eyes and chest-mounted RGB LED matrix. The team 3D-printed the robot’s body in several sections on a Creality Ender-5 Plus and the assembled figure is quite large, hence the “XXL” designation.

They animated the eyes using two custom PCBs, each of which has a diameter of 60mm and contains 101 SK6812MINI individually addressable RGB LEDs. They controlled those with a pair of Infineon XMC2GO microcontroller development boards. The chest display is a flexible 64×32 RGB LED matrix from Adafruit, which conforms to the cylindrical curve of the robot’s torso. They controlled that LED matrix with an Arduino Mega 2560 board through Adafruit’s RGB Matrix Shield. It displays a Christmas tree animation derived from z1co’s animation set for 32×32 matrices.

The result is a cheerful and adorable robot that fits perfectly with the holiday season!

The post The Infineon team’s XXL Chatbot offers you yuletide greetings appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Awkward silences can be highly uncomfortable. Thankfully, they’re a problem that can be solved by technology. Chatty Coaster aims to do just this, detecting pauses in conversation and interjecting with helpful questions to move things along.

The coaster is built around an Arduino Micro, which uses a microphone to detect audio levels in the room. When it detects an extended silence, it then fires off a sound clip using a Sparkfun audio breakout board. The questions vary from plain to politically sensitive, so there’s a good chance you could get some spicy conversation as a result. Any talking device runs a risk of being more annoying than helpful, and there’s certainly a risk that Chatty Coaster could fall into this category. Choosing the right content seems key here.

Overall, while this may not be the ultimate solution to boring company, it could get a laugh or two and serves as a good way to learn how to work with audio on microcontrollers. Video after the break.

We’ll admit, when we were reading this one, we thought we had deja vu. But this one’s a lot less blamey.