When Steve Ganz left his LinkedIn office to compete in the PDGA (Professional Disc Golf Association) World Tour, his fellow employees built a Twitter-reading robot to fill his chair.
(For those that don’t know, Twitter is a microblogging platform where users share the little things that are going on in their lives.)
The robot is essentially a talking “head” – a cardboard box stuffed with a microcontroller and LEDs. Fed through a USB port, the robot recieves twitter updates from a Java application. The application also sends the Ganzbot facial expressions as it figures out how to “pronounce” words.
Here are some videos of the Ganzbot in action:
Really cool! I would most definitely invest $25 in these things, they are a huge upgrade in USB slot fillers.
