Maker SHED

Make your bots and plushies come to life! Twitchie is an amazingly lifelike animated armature that's Arduino-powered and comes preprogrammed, making it an excellent kit for beginners in robotics. No programming required! You can download and modify the code if you want, and it's pretty light on soldering, too. We recommend Twitchie for young makers (both boys and girls) interested in robotics or in bringing plush toys to life.

• Twitchie: "How do I make it?" (PDF)
• More info, videos and pix!

The fuzzy robots pictured here all built on the same basic kit. Included are laser-cut wooden parts that can be assembled in several different configurations. The parts are designed to make it easy to use glue and other craft supplies to attach cloth, fur, buttons, string, doll parts, and all kinds of stuff. There are endless ways to dress them up!

The circuit board is based on the Arduino project, and shows up as a LilyPad in the Arduino programming environment. The CPU is an ATmega168. This means that changing the firmware is relatively easy and cheap. There is also a 6-pin ICSP header for an AVRISP if you are more advanced and can go without a bootloader. As an added bonus, the Twitchie circuit board can be configured to fit easily into a breadboard!