If you’ve got a tin can and a pair of headphones lying around, check out engineer Adam Kumpf‘s project: Canny the Robot.
Kump, an MIT engineering graduate and prototyper, has designed a robot that can be programmed with a pair of headphones. After pondering the concept of audio to transmit data, he wanted to demonstrate a way for devices to communicate directly via air, in a similar way to humans.
“Using audible sound (20Hz to 20kHz) as the communication channel, future electronics could continue to interact with other devices and the outside world for decades, even as the fundamental nature of computers (and their snazzy paraphernalia) transforms entirely,” Kumpf wrote on his project website.
Kumpf built a robot called Canny, equipped with a microcontroller that could update its eye color, eyebrow angle, and music notes. The robot has a set of red, green, and blue LEDs that Kumpf created to be used as combinations to express mood or indicating status during the programming. Each eye has an eyebrow composed of a servo that can change its angle and allow the bot to express itself. As for sound, he equipped the tin-can robot with a piezo speaker that allows it to play different musical notes. So when someone presses the robot’s nose, it can display a variety of colors, movements and sounds based on the program Kumpf installs.
Kumpf used a microphone and headphones to program Canny using high-frequency tones.
“While it’s quite feasible for a microcontroller (such as Arduino) to directly process the incoming audio from a microphone and decode the data, the processing overhead, precise timing required, and need for error detection can be major hurdles. So instead, I decided to decode the data in hardware (via a simple PLL circuit) that in turn outputs serial UART data that most microcontrollers can manage directly and access with just two lines of code.”
His entire project is open source, so anyone interested can experiment with adding headphone programming to projects. Download the code on his project page.
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