Maker creates iPhone controlled, solar-powered Arduino death tank

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httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmLU4GS7zAI

As a smartphone, the iPhone is hard to beat, but as a tool capable of inflicting extraordinary acts of physical violence, the handset is less impressive… even when compared to Apple’s other products.

A MacBook Air, of course, can be stealthily drawn across a carotid artery, but the iPhone’s rounded, lozenge-like design makes it a poor weapon for either stabbing or slashing. Neither can it be dropped like an anvil upon an unsuspecting brain pan, like the iMac, or used as a blunt, aluminum club, like the MacBook Pro. In battle, an iPhone — at best — can be hurled at an opponent as a distraction while you sprint, comically hooting, in the other direction. It’s a bizarre misstep in Jonathan Ives’ oeuvre of gladiatorial product designs.

Still, where Apple may have failed to deliver, enter the makers to transform the iPhone into the weapon of mass destruction it should be. Christopher Rojas took the TouchOSC application and used his iPhone to remote control a fantastic, solar-powered Arduino Tank, built out of parts from Sparkfun.

The design has its faults: the iPhone-controlled tank does not have an armor plating to fend off the whirring buzz saws of other iPhone-controlled kill bots, not does it have a laser-precise bee cannon to pin point the sweetly stingable vitreous humor of an opponent bot’s operator. Still, upon humble foundations! Maybe in Rev. 2.

[iPhone controlled solar-powered Arduino tank]

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