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.

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A boy from PH invents shoes that charge smartphones

Angelo Casimiro, a 15-year-old student from the Philippines did a little science experiment to charge smartphones or any portable device by simply walking.

Filipino kid smartshoes

Using piezoelectric transducers, Angelo Casimiro came up with a system that can harness the energy produced with each step made. He developed this idea and turned it into a project that he submitted at the 2014 Google Science Fair.

Basically, he attached a powerbank to some old sneakers together with diodes and transducers to come up with a pair of “smart shoes” that has the energy needed to power up a smartphone. There’s a list of everything he used if you want to try it out yourself. You can also watch the video for a more detailed explanation on how it works.

Update: It has come to our attention that there were three students from Philippine Science High School who first did this project, and in fact won an award at Project Tuklas around February of 2013. There must have been a conflict of sources.

{Source}

The post A boy from PH invents shoes that charge smartphones appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.

A boy from PH invents shoes that charge smartphones

Angelo Casimiro, a 15-year-old student from the Philippines did a little science experiment to charge smartphones or any portable device by simply walking.

Filipino kid smartshoes

Using piezoelectric transducers, Angelo Casimiro came up with a system that can harness the energy produced with each step made. He developed this idea and turned it into a project that he submitted at the 2014 Google Science Fair.

Basically, he attached a powerbank to some old sneakers together with diodes and transducers to come up with a pair of “smart shoes” that has the energy needed to power up a smartphone. There’s a list of everything he used if you want to try it out yourself. You can also watch the video for a more detailed explanation on how it works.

{Source}

The post A boy from PH invents shoes that charge smartphones appeared first on YugaTech | Philippines, Tech News & Reviews.