Gadgetory

hey guys we are here in the central plaza of CES just outside the cnet booth in a very large space so that we can take a look at a 50 foot snake and a mondo spider we'll get to that later but first I'm here with one of the creators of eat art so Charlie tell me what we're looking at right now so this is titanoboa it's a 50-foot long electromechanical snake and it's a actually a recreation of an ancient dinosaur snake the easter exists 60 million years ago what why why an ancient dinosaur snake well the idea was that the ancient snake went extinct because the climate cooled down so now in the face of modern climate change we're resurrecting this beast is kind of like a vehicle to generate discussions about energy issues okay so you guys are trying to make a statement with this 50-foot long mechanical okay just tell me how this works yeah like it well so this is a project that kind of blends a whole bunch of different disciplines of engineering with art so that's kind of our our target is we're going to try and get people excited about engineering and technology using a crazy mechanical sculpt it but how is it built it looks like a spinal cord to me yeah so what you see is there's a twenty custom welded aluminum vertebrae and between all the vertebrae's you've got cylinders that are kind of like the muscles of the snake and they work with hydraulic fluid it's kind of like the blood that pumps through the snake so um you said it's 50 feet but I noticed that there is a tail sitting over there in the corner so what happened to the tail yeah so we just took the tail off temporarily as we're getting set up here and we're getting rolling because sometimes it tends to whip around and have a bit of a mind of its own so have there been any injuries so far uh no usually we try and put ourselves between the snake and whatever else well its operating just so that we can if anybody's going to get damn it's gonna be okay good cuz I don't want to get damaged um so this thing is 1,200 pounds and I'm really excited to see it go and about all of you guys are excited to see it so let's make this thing happen okay okay everyone signed liability releases oh my god whoa okay this is insane I cannot believe how smoothly this thing is just snaking its way through the parking lot charlie don't get hit okay so now I see why the tail was taken off because I do not think that we could handle it um so yeah James over there is operating this titanoboa wirelessly with his remote controller so he has the most awesome job right now yeah he is the snake charmer he's the perfect driver for this machine and he's communicating with one of the several brains along the spine of the snake they're all working in tandem to coordinate that movement okay how long did it take you guys okay I heard you brought this to burning man right we did so we're our nonprofit organization called a art is funded these products are all funded by grants from organizations like burning man and sponsorships from companies like Lenovo who brought us here for this event so so tell me how the heck you guys managed to keep this thing functioning when you're at Burning Man and we all know it's a dust bowl where things are just flying you can't breathe so how the heck did this thing survive it was pretty rugged like we had a lot of technical difficulties up first year and you know dusts contaminating connections and and things but we're going to take it back hopefully this year with a lot more robust set up and be able two different kinds of motion and hopefully have a better time of it okay so I heard that you guys can actually monitor the Diagnostics I don't know if it's for the snake or for the spider via your smartphone yeah is that true we what we got here is this like like it's on a tablet and we've got all the kind of voltages battery levels motor speed pressure and all the sensor values so we can see what's going on via Wi-Fi from the snake as it's running so we got it working on like phones and tablets and stuff it's just a preliminary version of this app but yeah it's so it's an app can i download it can i monitor it while I'm at home wondering how my snake is doing on to i think you know you have to be close enough to get the Wi-Fi signal that's coming over to the snake's head but ok so from my hotel room across this yeah probably ok um no now I want to talk about the spider yeah so let's yeah let's do that ok guys we're moving on to the mondo spider all right so you so first of all did you actually get your hands dirty did you build these things yeah so I this is this titanoboa was originally my idea and then I brought more people on board on the team and as we got more and more into it I transitioned from doing like welding and it's already stuffed more should just kind of be in the project organizer because there was about 15 or 20 people working on this thing all volunteers in the evenings and weekends and stuff so ok so you bringing up the word volunteers kind of makes me want to ask is this what you do full-time is this lucrative how do you guy are you guys like all living in one bedroom and building things by night we all have our day jobs where engineers some of us are students artists and technicians and we just we all share this kind of common interest of making these crazy machines and we do in our spare time and and yeah so were you expecting it to be such a hit ah no when we first when we first started with this with the splatter we just were kind of driven by this desire to make something really cool and then once we had built it it became clear that that desire was kind of weed hidden pond something that was actually valuable and could be enjoyed by lots of people okay because I am ready to enjoy this thing um the great thing about the spider is that it is actually operated by a person sitting in it and today that person is going to be me so I'm oh yes maybe like John kind of explain how the spider works so thank you so much so I have John and Ryan with me so tell me about how the spider works and the spider is a big magnificent piece of Clockwork yeah it's very a lot of words yeah it's very easy to operate as long as you're properly trained so oh sorry real quick I am not properly trained well that's hopefully we can get you up to being properly trained in the next couple of seconds Oh so the first thing you have to do is figure out how to get in okay and then we'll show you the controls and some of the emergency safety maneuvers okay but before but before I go in I'm just kind of curious as to how this works right I'm not an engineer so pretend well that it's actually a totally closed loop zero emissions machine so we have a mobile side that makes complete sense to me no one of those ok we have a mobile solar array which charges a set of lithium iron phosphate batteries like you might see an electric car okay and then the batteries run electric motors the motors run hydraulic pumps the pumps robin hydraulic where are the solar panels the solar panels are back in Vancouver oh so it's already been charged up