RoboHeart
For Christmas, I hacked my wife’s Jim Bauer robot sculpture. It had a red plastic heart that flickered when switched on. The bulb had burned out, and it would have been easy enough to replace, but why do that when I could make it better?
All I would need is a BlinkM, an Arduino, and a Wi-Fi router.
I replaced the candelabra bulb inside the robot with a ThingM BlinkM MaxM, printed a new heart on the MakerBot, and used an Arduino to drive the whole thing. By hooking it up to a Asus WL-520gU Wi-Fi router, I can control it over Wi-Fi.
The Wi-Fi part was the complicated part, but fortunately Todbot figured it out already, so I was able to rely on his excellent blog post.
I fixed the luma power curve graph in part 2 on my blog, in case you got a error. (I originally tried to publish the graph from a Google doc spreadsheet, but it didn’t work unless you were logged in as me.)