If music technology has ever made you dream of autonomous musical robots, crawling around the floor making sound like a Juilliard of mechanical insect prodigies, I’ve got great news for you.
While we’re on the subject of DIY electronics, here are some words of encouragement: the designer who made that fantastic drum machine robot making the rounds on the Web says he’s got a day job, and you, too, can do what he did.
Yes, you.
First, check out the autonomous, banging-on-stuff and sampling drummer robot pictured above, if you haven’t seen it yet:
Robot Drum Machine Roams, Samples, Bangs On Stuff
Creator Frits Lyneborg (aka fristl) writes CDM (after hurdling our spam filters — sorry about that):
Hi there – Yes I am out there, and next to me is some sticks & wires & some yellow belt tracks 😀
Thanks for all the street-credit etc, thank you so very much. I hope my next robot / next weekend can live up to this, lol!
I am CEO of bee3.com – consider this brilliant company next time you want a website. Well – what else to do with my 15 minutes of fame, if not an ad for my company 😉
Anyway – it is very easy to make these robots, seriously; I do not have much of a clue, I just have plenty of glue. Hey – what a little fame can bring up in you, rhyming now, so muzical 🙂
i have made a walk through on how to make a quite capable robot, that uses all the same basics, and it only takes 2 hours once you got the parts send by mail.. letsmakerobots.com
Trust me; it is fun and easy to build robots!
Still skeptical? Here’s an even simpler design:
That’s too big? Too heavy? Too complicated? You’re too broke to spend US$85? This robot is even simpler and costs just $40 in parts (some of which you may have already):
It’s the cute little bot below. And talk about simple: it’s like a battery with wheels.
Neither of these designs is specifically musical, but that might actually be ideal for starting a musical project, since they’re so simple. I also start what you could do with a swarm of these and some internal synth chips. That’s something evidently other people have been thinking of, but with more sophisticated hardware — I’d prefer to do it with something cheap. Stay tuned.
