Just when you thought the cutting edge of home defense technology couldn’t possibly have any more surprises, David Bowen (the guy who rigged up a revolver controlled by a group of flies) goes and does this.
You may have seen a product recently that uses a circuit board and microcontroller to interpret the electrical signals live plants and mushrooms produce, and turn them into music. While interesting, at a sale price of $420, it’s not the sort of thing too many people are going to jump on. Clearly David saw this and decided he was going to improve on it. Well, we’re here to tell you that “improve” doesn’t even begin to describe what he did.
Using what appears to be a very similar input device, David’s new design takes the same electrical signals the plant uses to do whatever it is a plant needs to do, and sends them to another microcontroller. This time though, the input is not used to produce music, but to direct the movement of a robot arm. That arm, as it happens, is also holding a machete, and does not appear to ever stop moving. While it’s true that it might be dangerous to exist around a wildly unpredictable robot endlessly swinging a machete in your kitchen, entirely at the whim of a houseplant, it’s also true that anyone attempting to break into your home would feel the same way. We know we would, certainly.
We can only imagine the possibilities for such a product, and the future is even foggier when it comes to what the hell Mr. Bowen is going to come up with next, but we can say that watching plants machete fight is 100% something we would pay to see. So long as there’s alcohol and betting involved anyway.
