Everyone’s favorite electronics hobby shop, Adafruit has posted instructions for building your own HAL 9000 replica out of a big red button, an Arduino board, and some cleverly cut plastic. Best of all? With the press of a button you can make HAL tell you what to do – until you kill it.
HAL is mostly made of laser cut plastic parts and a few nice decals. His brains are an Arduino Uno R3 with speakers attached and his jolly red button is a $10 arcade button. Best of all, the buttons come in white, blue, and green so you can make your own weird version of HAL that lives in an alternate 2001 universe.
To be clear, this is not an exact replica. However, it’s cool enough to, say, act as a cubicle charm or workspace novelty that will allow you, the human, to triumph over the encroaching hellfire of technological domination.
A group of students from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University who started off on a project has begun to explore the relationship between color as well as sound. The brainchild of Natasha Dzurny and Louie Foo, their final product is known as Color Play, which is a device that resembles a record player, although it will play back music from a color wheel instead of a music record.
