Boston Stupid Shit and Terrible Ideas Hackathon, a recap.
We Tuned a Fish.
So, back in April I got to participate in the Boston Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon with Ted Sirota. The basic premise was to hold true to the name and make something awful that no-one would ever need, let alone want.... Of which I think we hit it out of the park.
We made a Big Mouth Billy Bass using a real fish.
And it Talked.
Wait, what's a Big Mouth Billy Bass? - It's one of these....
One of those kitschy objects that you hang on your wall that gathers dust and might sometimes entertain guests but mostly just sits there until its sold in a yard sale or tossed out. Or connected to your personal assistant of choice, but that's a whole other mess.
In short, it's already a pretty bad thing. Perfectly suited to become terrible.
That right there is an honest to goodness, relatively fresh real European Seabass.
Not visible are the two servos to animate it.
It also had a speaker, along with a text to speech generator that Ted put together for it.
The upsides of this version were that it's mostly plastic free, and mainly made of renewable resources. It also is gluten free, however it is not vegan.
The main components were a raspberry pi that handled the text to speech that triggered an arduino over GPIO. The arduino controlled the movement of the servos inside the fish. The text for the text to speech was input via wireless keyboard. The backer was laser cut ply.
We also did a short presentation...
Needless to say this was a terrible idea. It's been done now, please don't do it yourself.
Of note: The hackathon was featured in This Article, where I was proudly given photo credit as 'A Man".