FEMSAPIEN ARRIVES!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

WOOT!

It has been a long awaited day… the arrival of the Femsapien!

I won the Femsapien through a contest on Robots Podcast. The contest was to guess what the Femsapiens did while in Switzerland, and the answer was skiing! I really wanted to win, so I created a drawn animation with many guesses. Luckily, I guessed skiing and it was right!

The box has an awesome sticker on it!

That raised many eyebrows when people saw it.

The Femsapien looks very awesome and powerful. Almost as if she would laser beam someone who bugs her.

Unwrapping it reminded me of the way Barbie dolls are wrapped. They have these black plastic clips with intense wire wraps, “chaining” the doll down. For the Femsapien, it was the same thing, and equally EXCRUCIATING to unpack! It took a good 20 minutes to get to this stage:

I finally got her unwrapped. It is an awesome robot! I feel a little silly switching from she/it all the time… what would you classify this robot as? I call MANOI an it, so shouldn’t I call Femsapien an it? Or would that be offending not only the Femsapien, but humans as well? Hmmm…

I still don’t really understand how to make it walk and stuff. I like it when it dances though, the music is so funny It takes 3 AA batteries in each foot (that totals to 9V). I wasn’t expecting to need that many batteries! That’s a lot!

Anyway… I need to play with it a bit more

What I found REALLY cool though was how GREEN it is.

When you move a DC motor, it generates power. Usually, this power is sucked up by a diode.

However, in the Femsapien, this power is used to light up tiny red LEDs in her arm. That is SO COOL!

So, even when the Femsapien isn’t on, you can have lights.

Thanks a bunch Robots Podcast! I really appreciate this.

I think I will start hacking this on Friday-ish. I still want to play with it beforehand

Posted in: Projects, Robot.
Tags: EPFL, Femsapien, GREEN, LIS, Robots Podcast, Switzerland

2 Responses to “FEMSAPIEN ARRIVES!”

1. sybarite13 Says:
   February 18th, 2009 at 10:20 AM

   Congratulations Erin!!! She/It is beautiful.
   Have fun interfacing with her/it. Very cool.
   Also, I like the Valentine’s Day photo of
   her/it with MANOI. Ah, robot love;-)

2. Erin, the RobotGrrl Says:
   February 18th, 2009 at 6:55 PM

   Hahaha, thanks Eve!

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