Handshake Gorilla workshop at FabLab Kamakura

In Kamakura I gave a workshop with the Handshake Gorilla Arduino kit I designed for FabLab Manchester. Great fun to make robot gorillas in japan. The kit is meant to be a playful introduction to interaction design with the Arduino. When you grab the gorillas hand, you trigger a switch that makes a servo motor move the arm up and down. The result is a very polite handshaking gorilla. By using the Kinect skeleton tracker in Firefly, we also played with controlling the RoboGorillas with our own arm movements.

Assembling the gorilla parts

Connecting the arduino to the hand trigger

First handshake, nice to meet you Mr.Gorilla

Unexpectedly the gorillas would respond to eachother when their hand sensors touched. Fighting gorillas!

Using the Kinect and Firefly to control RoboGorillas