JabberBot

A Bluetooth remote-controlled robot: an Arduino with an ATmega brain, driven from a phone over the air. Direction, speed, and the little dignities of stopping, all relayed wirelessly to a chassis that does exactly what it is told, late, and at carpet level.

Built in 2011 in the young maker’s Athlone workshop, JabberBot was the garden’s first rover — Arduino for the senses, a Bluetooth module for the voice, and a chassis that carried both. The software side lives in Java, the tongue of the era’s phones.

It exists because a robot you can steer from your own pocket was, in 2011, the nearest thing to magic the workshop could legally own.

the writeup lives elsewhere: the JabberBot writeup on instructables

Chulann the smith had a hound at his gate, and the hound was the finest in Ulster, and when a boy killed it with his bare hands the boy did the only honest thing in the whole saga: he took the hound’s place. Took its duties, its name, its watch. Cú Chulainn — the Hound of Culann — for the rest of his days. This garden’s hound came cheaper: an ATmega for a brain, a Bluetooth module for ears, an Arduino for the whole nervous system, and a phone in the maker’s hand for a leash. In Athlone in 2011 the workshop bench was young, the solder smoke was cheerful, and the Faire years were coming; a rover you could drive from your own pocket was the kind of wonder you built to prove the bench could prove things. It guarded no gate and no cattle — it guarded the carpet, and faithfully, answering every command over the air like a hound that had learned to come when the whistle was digital. Two reels survive of the rover itself, hardware and software, and the seanchaí note: the hound’s job is watching; whoever does it faithfully, gets the name.

The camera came to the bench itself, and the reels it carried back are planted here:

JabberBot — the rover itself, ATMega brain, bluetooth braun. — JabberBot Part 2 — the software half of the rover.

plays alongside 3 reels in the garden’s film-house