This little 6th generation iPod nano just wants to dance. Because that's what its human programmed it to do.
Kazu Terasaki, also known as
YouTube user PachimonDotCom, is a Japanese software engineer from Silicon Valley, CA who is addicted to making apple products walk around. He has been working on this project for years, hoping to create a robo-legs product that could give any gadget the ability to walk around, says a GetRobo post about Kazu's walking objects project from 2008:
Kazu's expertise and motto is "to surprise people by creating new stuff using just ordinary technology." His ideas and perspective have brought in a breath of fresh air to the robotics community in Japan where engineers generally want to use the most advanced and expensive technologies.
To give this little bot legs, Kazu attached two servos (one for each leg) and a battery
to the back of the iPod. To control the legs, he used the signal from the headphone jack as a pulse-width modification signal, which means it can tell the battery to provide intermediate amounts of power between a fully on and a fully off state. Kazu even added googly eyes, and Mashable
figured out his trick:
Getting the nano to display an animation was done with a simple trick, since the nano is not iOS-based and doesn’t allow the installation of third party apps. It does, however, display animated GIFs, and that’s how the eye animation was created.
Before robo-sizing the nano, Kazu had also given legs to a couple of iPhones and an iPad. Let's just say he is is the wind beneath their servos, check out their dance troupe in the video below. Related content: Not Exactly Rocket Science: Enter the nano-spiders – independent walking robots made of DNA
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Videos: Youtube/PachimonDotCom
