This 17-year old Filipino built a working BB-8 droid

Angelo Casimiro, the same student who made shoes that charge smartphones, is at it once again and this time, he builds a fully-functioning BB-8 droid from the latest Star Wars movie.

filipino-bb8-droid

The droid replica is phone-controlled and was made with household materials and Arduino circuitry. With Angelo’s know-how on electronics and robotics, doing this project was fairly simple for him and he even posted a detailed tutorial on instructables.com where you can follow his steps on making your own working droid just like in the movie.

As for the materials, an instructional video posted by TechBuilder shows that he bought the necessary items (like paint, glue and a beach ball) from a hardware store and everything else is recycled — like the Christmas ball for BB-8’s eye, a Wi-Fi router antenna, and roll-on deodorant balls for the mechanism of the droid’s head that stays upright all the time.

Although Angelo is the brains behind this project, his family helped him in some areas like painting the body and designing it to be faithful to the markings of the droid in the movie. It’s also reported that he is currently making some improvements on the droid before its scheduled TV appearance.

If you want to make one for yourself, the above video shows you just that. It covers the steps from making the body itself down to the mechanism and programming the software so you could control it from a smartphone.

{Via} {Source}

The post This 17-year old Filipino built a working BB-8 droid appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines News & Tech Reviews.

DIY smartphone Project Ara: What are your specs?

So we’ve seen Samsung’s Galaxy S5 flagship phone. There’s also Sony’s Xperia Z2 and even the All-new HTC One. With these companies giving us a set of fixed specs, I say forget about all the hoopla for a second and instead, you tell us what you want to see in your smartphone when Google’s DIY Project Ara comes to fruition.

ara7

I’ll get this started. Here’s how I want my Project Ara:

4.7-inch body
1920 x 1080 display
20MP rear camera with Xenon flash and night vision
5MP wide-angle front camera
4K video recording
Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor
3GB RAM
64GB internal memory
Stereo speakers
Pico projector
2 x 2500mAh battery

Since I’m more of a multimedia guy, I want my specs to lean more towards imaging capabilities. I’d prefer a 20MP rear camera with 4K video capabilities and a Xenon bulb so I could effectively capture clear and blur-free images even at night, with the option of night vision widely-seen on Sony’s handycams. To share them, I’d get a Pico projector of some sort to easily show my latest photos or short films to my friends. Also, two battery modules to hot-swap!

The point of this article (besides publicly day-dreaming about our fantasy phones) is so that we realize the possibility of the future of smartphones as early as today. Google’s Project Ara is now undergoing developer conferences and could come early 2015 – which is just a year from now.

Would it be a hit to consumers like you? How much would it affect other smartphone manufacturers? Would their strategy change? If so, how? Only time will tell.

The post DIY smartphone Project Ara: What are your specs? appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

DIY smartphone Project Ara: What are your specs?

So we’ve seen Samsung’s Galaxy S5 flagship phone. There’s also Sony’s Xperia Z2 and even the All-new HTC One. With these companies giving us a set of fixed specs, I say forget about all the hoopla for a second and instead, you tell us what you want to see in your smartphone when Google’s DIY Project Ara comes to fruition.

ara7

I’ll get this started. Here’s how I want my Project Ara:

4.7-inch body
1920 x 1080 display
20MP rear camera with Xenon flash and night vision
5MP wide-angle front camera
4K video recording
Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor
3GB RAM
64GB internal memory
Stereo speakers
Pico projector
2 x 2500mAh battery

Since I’m more of a multimedia guy, I want my specs to lean more towards imaging capabilities. I’d prefer a 20MP rear camera with 4K video capabilities and a Xenon bulb so I could effectively capture clear and blur-free images even at night, with the option of night vision widely-seen on Sony’s handycams. To share them, I’d get a Pico projector of some sort to easily show my latest photos or short films to my friends. Also, two battery modules to hot-swap!

The point of this article (besides publicly day-dreaming about our fantasy phones) is so that we realize the possibility of the future of smartphones as early as today. Google’s Project Ara is now undergoing developer conferences and could come early 2015 – which is just a year from now.

Would it be a hit to consumers like you? How much would it affect other smartphone manufacturers? Would their strategy change? If so, how? Only time will tell.

The post DIY smartphone Project Ara: What are your specs? appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.