Chin Up
This DIY robot will keep you from slouching at your desk
Be honest with yourselves: Nothing else has worked so far, has it?
Readers, has this ever happened to you? You’re working at your desk for hours on end, a cog within a capitalist system built by men in echelons far beyond your reach, and the day’s exertion is catching up to you. You know you’re not supposed to slouch forward in your chair, but the temporary reprieve is far more satisfying than maintaining proper posture for your back’s sake years down the line. What if there was always someone nearby, constantly watching you, ever-ready to remind you to stop being such a grotesque oaf?
Well, now there can be! Introducing Norbert Zare’s DIY robot posture buddy — a small, purportedly easy-to-construct motion-sensing machine that gently extends a friendly, not-at-all-creepy hand towards your chest whenever it detects you slumping forward. “The operating premise is simple,” explains Hackaday, “If the body angle is more than 55 degrees off vertical, move the servos and shove the body back in to the correct position.”
Check out a video of the gizmo in action below. The Github program code and wiring schematics are both available online for the truly masochistic among you. What a time to be alive!
A golden age of online DIY projects — In all honesty, we’ve seen a lot of great DIY endeavors online in recent years. With the rise of Raspberry Pi and Arduino products, there’s really no better time to dive into tinkering with these things. For proof, check out this homemade T9 keypad to relive our predictive text glory days, this gorgeous wooden keyboard, or the... um... “Yayagram.”
A lot better than the other bots out there — Of course, we’d chose a small, posture-correcting desktop bot any day of the workweek when compared to some of the other true monstrosities out there right now. To be honest, we’re still having T2: Judgement Day-esque nightmares about that quadrupedal bot with an assault rifle mounted on its top. If the image alone doesn’t scream “evil” to you, then just remember that it was built by companies called Ghost Robotics and SWORD International. If those aren’t movie villain monikers, we don’t know what are.