A Telepresence Robot for the Grandparents

My wife and I had a baby recently, and my parents are oh-so eager to meet her. Since they are halfway around the world, though, they'll have to wait until we visit. In the meantime, I made a budget telepresence robot, so they can watch the baby while she's on her swing from any angle they want ( but from a hamster's point of view!). For telepresence, a videochat application running on the phone will technically do, but for the moment, it'll broadcast one-way using IPWebcam

While not as elaborate as OSCAR, by Google's Gus Class, my project was put together in a couple of days and cost next to nothing.

I used:

1. The Arduino and Bluetooth module previously in the quadruped
2. The old Android phone previously in the Headshot
3. Python + Flask and some JavaScript for the web server application
4. One El-Cheapo robot chassis off ebay.
5. A single L293D motor driver.

Crude and basic, but it works.

The Robot in action

A couple of days before this post, Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen controlled a robot from Low Earth Orbit from the ISS (altitude of 400 km) . It gave me certain satisfaction to see my robot move in Australia, while being controlled by my brother in South America! 

An Elaborate Joke

A while ago I was tempted by an awesome looking deal by Humble Bundle, that included Multimedia Fusion 2. To try it, I made a horribly crude game only intended as a joke to my group of friends . To my disappointment, however, the catch was that that version of the software only exports to the deprecated "Java Applet" format, and to export to HTML5, you had to buy the $200+ Fusion 2.5.

Luckily, I found the awesome GDevelop platform, that allows game programming through an intuitive GUI that saves you having to learn specific JavaScript conventions and syntax. I made this game in a weekend including a main screen, introduction and ending, using some of the included textures and sprites.

The game itself consists of a a short, one minute platform level, with humor that would make no sense to those outside my group of friends. Besides, it is rather inappropriate and uses stuff I grabbed of the web with no regard to copyright or credit, hence I'm not making it public. Here's two screenshots, though: