Past Projects

Go here to see pictures and video of some of my past projects. There are two sets of pictures. The ones with the robotic hand are from a mod I did recently. I found a toy online called Piano Hand, which was a clear robotic hand that played piano music and wiggled its fingers like it was playing. It was $20. As soon as I got one, I realized that it was not as articulate as I thought; it has one motor that when going forward cycles the four fingers as if it were drumming them. When it is in reverse, it switches gears and moves the thumb in and out. So it can only move the thumb OR the fingers, and not at the same time. But I still thought it was really cool, but needed some help. The piano sound it played was really annoying, so I took the speaker out and bypassed the controller board entirely. I then took apart a Vex servo and modified it to control the motor from the hand. Then I hooked it up the a Vex microcontroller and a transmitter and shoved it all in a tissue box (it was then end of the year and I did all of this at school since the teachers had given up doing anything, so all I had was a tissue box). It was then really easy to plant the box somewhere and start moving the fingers from a room or 2 away.

The other pictures and video in there are from a remake I did of a R/C Chef Boyardee can. They were all taken on my phone, so they are lower quality. Sorry. Anyway, several years ago there was a commercial that you can watch here. I saw this commercial and thought nothing of it until I saw a page on m5industries.com (Jamie Hyneman's (from mythbusters) special effects shop wesite). Unfortunatly, they took the page down, but they had pictures of the can without a label on and you could see the electronics. I have the pictures saved somewhere (archive.org didn't save them) and I will post them when I find them. So anyway, once I saw those pictures, I thought it would be cool to build one myself. So I did. My friend helped me out. The videos are of it rolling and the pictures are the exploded view. I used an R/C car circuit and had a friend machine a flywheel that steered it. The cool thing is that is does not drive on 2 wheels, the entire can rotates around the electronics in the inside. I still have the can in my room, but it needs some repair. It also needs a real control system, not an iffy R/C circuit from a junk toy car. But it works.

So thats 2 projects that I did that are kinda cool. I will post more pictures and videos of projects in that same site later, and probably organize it with folders to.