So what happens when you’ve just built this awesome camera app but your client wants you to manually test it out like… 10,000 times? You have two options: you can spend the rest of your earthly days pressing shutter, save, and repeating the process orrrr you can just build yourself a robot finger out of Legos. Simple enough, yes?
It sure seemed to be for the guys over at Pheromone Labs. After their client asked for between 10,000 to 15,000 manual load tests of the application they built, the team figured a little ingenuity would save loads of time and energy, reports TUAW. Ingredients: a Lego Mindstorm kit and a few capacitive styluses. Easy as that.
While the end-product (video below) is more exciting than you’d assume, none seem more pleased with it than Jon Masse, a member of the developer team and the one who blogged about the experience.
Arriving at work this morning there were many more people circling my desk than usual. They were all curious to see what kind of insanity the team had cooked up this time. And there it was sitting on my desk chugging along snapping pics not phased by the attention it was getting. A perfect example of creative automation.
Granted, Pheromone Labs’ robotic finger is much less intense than this seemingly useless life-sized robotic hand, but then again the automatic picture taker actually has purpose. And is thus human*.
*JK