Control a Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots match with tweets

Los Angeles-based interactive agency Friendly Vengeance is putting up its dukes to “Knock Out Injustice” with the five-day social media fundraising campaign “KO Bots” to benefit L.A. Kitchen.

A pair of Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots are ingeniously employed for this charity boxing match, in which the action is entirely decided by Twitter. Participants tweet @KO_Bots with the hashtags #RedBot or #BlueBot to prompt the robot of that color to take a symbolic swing at issues including ageism, food waste and recidivism, then watch the impact of their post by following along in real-time online.

Punches are thrown using a set of servo motors connected to an Arduino Mega capable of reading simple inputs (such as a tweet) and generating an output (in this case, a punch). Friendly Vengeance CEO Steve Tiseo tell us:

To detect a popped up head, we attached a photoresistor below the chin and set a threshold for determining when the bot is “knocked out.” A Python script searches for #RedBot and #BlueBot, and then sends integers to the Arduino to randomize punches via USB serial communication. If a bot’s knocked out, it sends a number back to the Python script to tally a KO on the site.

After playing, users receive a thank you tweet and a link to make a donation. To learn more about the project and its cause, head over to the KO Bots page. The fight will be streaming from December 19 to December 23, though tweets can be sent to the robots at any time during the event.

from Arduino Blog http://bit.ly/2h3aAms