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.

via: GadgetMatch
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Kevin Bruce Francisco

Kevin Bruce Francisco is the Senior Editor and Video Producer for YugaTech. He's a Digital Filmmaking graduate who's always either daydreaming of traveling or actually going places on his bike. Follow him on Twitter for more tech updates @kevincofrancis.

http://www.yugatech.com

9 Comments

Miss Call says:

9 years ago

Ah! He was the guy who invented piezoelectricity! Good for him.
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Karl says:

9 years ago

First off, piezoelectric effect is a phenomenon, not an invention.
Secondly, he invented shoes that charges smartphones. Now, this may not sound extraordinary or new to engineers or scientists like us, but you should give it to the kid for his fascination and enthusiasm for such things.

What were you doing when you were 15 years old? Why are some people just feel the need to be bitter when others actually accomplish something?
Karl says:

9 years ago

As I read more cyber literature about Angelo, I found out that social media just made an exaggeration on him developing the piezoelectric shoes project. It was an existing project from instructables.com.

Still, I believe that he has a long way to go in tech building. Great ideas can come in a snap, but implementing them excellently requires this kind of motivation and constant improvement.

Ronaldq says:

9 years ago

That’s awesome! Can’t really hate that guy.

And here I am having hard to time to crack eggs in one hand. lol
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Easy E says:

9 years ago

He deserves the best engineering and business education there is.
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Humble says:

9 years ago

Astig!
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Luke says:

9 years ago

That BB-8 droid project can’t do some of its promised basic functions. If you look closely at the intro of the video where he talks and looks at BB-8, you’ll see someone moving the droid’s head.
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thecorrescode says:

9 years ago

Waste of time watching. The droid can’t even do anything.

Misaka Touma says:

9 years ago

I wish I have money… kz kung may pera may pangbili ng materials.. kung ako may pera gagawa ako ng home made anti aircraft rail canon. bwahahaha!
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