Foxbot - arduino-based creature

Project
arduino-based creature (May 2012)
Client
Denitsa Blagoeva
My role
electronics, software (arduino), backend development (php)
Website
denitsablagoeva.com

Goldsmiths end-of-year show project collaboration with design student Denitsa Blagoeva. It showcases a creature whose emotions are powered by social network activity.

Our idea was to aggregate user-specific content for two users in a relationship, using public social networks APIs (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc). Said content would be metadata-scored, and also parsed semantically for meaning (where, three years ago, we hit a roadblock), to arrive at a sort of emotional score, which was also being averaged over time, gradually developing a personality.

The foxbot polls a web service, the response of which contains an indication of emotional state (basic ones for our test exhibit). This, in turn, informs the behaviour of the bot, which moves its head along two axes (shake and nod) and plays back pre-recorded vocal sounds expressing emotion. These are PCM-encoded in 32khz/8bit, playing back through a bare-minimum DAC circuit.

Fox:

  • Powered by Arduino Uno + network shield
  • coded in C
  • Interrupt-driven 32kHz 8bit double-buffered raw PCM audio playback from SD card
  • Two-axis head movement using servo motors
  • custom HTTP API client
  • design and box manufacturing by Denitsa Blagoeva

Server:

  • PHP 5 + API libraries for Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter
  • MySQL for API data and scheduling

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