“Doctor Who” Dalek controlled by iPhone accelerometer

John Brownlee ()

According to Doctor Who lore, inside the dimpled chassis of the genocidal Dalek is a cycloptic squidling, but Steve over at BotBuilder knows the real truth: in actuality, the warbling, murderous cyborgs are remote controlled via iPhone using the accelerometer.

According to Steve, “The iPhone sends out OSC signals over WiFI to processing which then talks over serial to my Servo Board. The Dalek moves around when you tilt the ipod/iphone. I am getting the accelerometer data out for this. I also have a turret that can be rotated and some leds that are switch-able.”

All very well and good, Steve, but you just haven’t taken this project far enough until I can pick up my iPhone, shriek “Exterminate!” into the mic and have it automatically converted into an oscillating, high-pitched electronic shriek emanating from the remote-controlled Dalek’s head plunger.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPhone, News |

  • Poppa

    Looks good, it could be the great idea of controlling exec toys with an iPhone app,Dalek or micro helicopter I would buy one.

  • brooks

    He might be able to control the Daleks but he needs to exterminate some of his desktop icons.

  • Rob

    If you will allow me to “nerd-out” for a moment…

    Great demo! Very impressive!

    Only thing: the part of your Dalek that rotates is called the turret – not the head.
    I warned you I was gonna nerd-out
    :-)
    cheers!

  • bob

    You can use the app he uses yourself to talk to Processing/Java/C++/Objective-C/Ruby/anything that has an OSC library/addon and can control anything you can hook it up to like hardware and lots of audio/visual software like a little jazzmutant lemur, it’s on the store: http://hexler.net

  • http://www.botbuilder.co.uk Steve

    Hi,

    It’s Steve the Daleks creator :-)

    @ brooks I have exterminated some of the icons, they only creep onto the 2nd monitor a bit now.

    @ Rob I did actually cut the head to allow the turret to rotate, but I had a hard time getting the mechanism to work. As this is a bubble bath bottle, it naturally had a removable top. This was far easier to hack.

    @ bob It is indeed the offering from hexler.net :-)

    @John It was intended to have it scream “Exterminate” but I just could not get that working! Maybe in the next version, I got another from ebay :-)

    Cheers, Guys.

    Was a fun hack to do!