This Robot Will Crawl Its Way Into Your Nightmares
Covered in clothing or another disguise, YouTuber Sciencish's robot moves toward a flashlight after it's turned off.
When you hear something bump in the night, there’s a good chance your first instinct is to shine a light at it. If you don’t see anything, you can turn the light off and hopefully go back to sleep. What if that something was an amorphous blob of clothing, which initially looks safe enough, but then you can hear it moving toward you when the lights are off? It’s a pretty scary spooky, and something that YouTuber “Sciencish” was able to pull off with an Arduino Uno and an array of four light dependent resistors (LDRs).
Sciencish's “Nightmare Robot" first waits for the room to get dark, then detects when a flashlight is pointed at it. After the flashlight is powered down, it calculates where the light was coming from, and waits a while to lull the victim into a sense of security. It then turns to face the person, and advances incrementally — certainly disturbing at night.
The robot employs a pair of stepper motors and DRV8825 drivers for differential movement. It features holes on the chassis for wire or filament attachment, allowing for shirts or other articles of clothing to drape over it to create an amorphous pile of “who knows what." The LDRs can recognize light shining through fabric, but the correct material must be used for the proper amount of light to penetrate. Sciencish also made a cardboard Minecraft spider covering, which could be more initially terrifying, if not so subtle!