Design students Shanshan Zhou, Adam Ben-Dror and Joss Doggett created "Pinokio," a kind of animatronic version of the adorable animated Pixar lamp. The detailed build-log offers very useful insights into making this sort of thing with Processing, Arduino, and OpenCV.. But the video really speaks for itself — what a treat!

Construction on the head was by far the most technically challenging, as I embedded a hacked webcam, microphone, mechanical iris, 2 servos and halogen globe into a tiny cavity at the back of the lamp shade. The designing of face plate was aided by cardboard cutouts before being fabricated out of 2mm acrylic.


pinokio still in progress