I’m Sorry Dave: Making a Mascot

Some of my greatest memories from college involve dumpster diving. Our group of makers was particularly savvy at rescuing valuable appliances, equipment, and materials from certain doom at the landfill. It was always exciting when one of us found something worthwhile in the garbage, but once in a while a truly wonderful find would set us off on a whole new adventure – as was the case when I got a text from a friend asking if we had a need for a server cabinet being discarded by the engineering department.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to take apart a piece of professional (and originally expensive) technology, we helped him wheel it over to the library (in which our Makerlab was located) for disassembly. After stripping it of its cobweb-coated internals, we promptly proceeded to let it sit in the corner for six months.

As time went on, it became clear that we needed to either do something with the monstrosity, or send it on its merry way. Fortunately for us, another student involved in the Makerlab at the time suggested we turn it into some kind of interactive display – designed to exhibit and demonstrate technologies like Arduino and Raspberry Pi (small circuit-board-type computers used for prototyping) that would otherwise be hard to explain to newcomers.

I had previously seen a display at Boise’s newly-built community center, JUMP, where, upon pressing a large (5ft diameter) play button, it would emit a randomly chosen sound clip from a library of cartoon-like effects. At 20 years old, I had spent my fair share of time repeatedly pressing this button, and I knew it would be simple enough to replicate in our server cabinet for Makerlab visitors to enjoy.

We installed speakers into the front grill of the cabinet (also salvaged from a dumpster), and mount an industrial “big red button” to the top surface. With the help of our resident computer science expert, who had originally sparked the project, we managed to configure the button to trigger a specified sound clip by using an Arduino to read the input and a Raspberry Pi to process the audio (we could have skipped the Arduino, but wanted the ability to expand its abilities later on).

Unfortunately, shortly after achieving a basic functionality, our programmer graduated, and the torch of finishing the project was passed to me – who had taken one class in an unrelated language freshman year, and hadn’t touched coding since. I will admit, I was truly intimidated. However, we had already come far enough that I couldn’t let it fall through.

Several days of Googling and troubleshooting later, it was complete (well… relatively). Designed to power on and run its program automatically when plugged in, a press of the button brought forth one of 65 sound bites taken from music, movies, TV, games, YouTube videos, and other sources of pop culture. Of course, because of the imposing appearance of the cabinet, the clip used during all testing phases was the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey introducing himself. Makerlab regulars quickly began calling the box HAL, and it stuck.

Over the course of a year, I added more than 140 audio clips to HAL. Students with nearby classes would come into the Makerlab just to press the button and hear what “he” had to say. He became a maker mascot – acting as a fortune teller, a decision maker, a “meme machine”, a part-time babysitter, and a powerful recruiting tool for visitors. But something was missing. The sounds were fun, but in my mind, HAL’s static appearance was begging for a little more personality.

During one summer, I spent several days installing addressable LED strips inside HAL’s front grill, and learning how to program them so they would sync up with certain audio clips and button triggers. I ended up creating a startup sequence – triggered by a new separate power switch, and a shutdown sequence: allowing us to put him to sleep during times when we didn’t want his button to be active. I also created an “Easter egg” feature (above) that would trigger a rainbow effect if the button was held down.

Because we had originally used an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi, I was able to send the data signal to the lights using an Arduino library, without having to design a new circuit for the Pi.

At this point, HAL was a favorite of the maker community, not only at Boise State, but around the city, as well. He became one of the signature exhibits for the Creative Technologies Association at our outreach events – entertaining children and adults alike for hours on end.

Since I graduated, other students involved with the Makerlab have taken on HAL as their own project – each with their own plans for future sounds and features. A diagram was originally created to indicate where we wanted to place dozens of switches, dials, levers, and knobs once we got the button working. In fact, HAL is also an acronym for “Haptic Applications Laboratory”. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite get around to it during our time at Boise State, but because HAL is a continually persistent project, there will be plenty of time for him to realize his full potential. By then, who knows how many students will be able to call him their friend.