Robot Chameleon Teaches Little Girl About Camouflage

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[Markus] has been teaching his daughter about animals using a big old animal encyclopedia. A few days ago, they stumbled upon the chameleon, and when he tried to explain its camouflage abilities, she didn’t quite understand. So he decided to make her a pet color-changing chameleon robot. The best part is he built it during her nap!

It’s a fairly simple circuit consisting of an Arduino Uno, a TCS3200 color sensor with breakout board, a ping pong ball, some resistors, and an RGB LED. He plans on adding temperature sensing as well as a capacitive sensor for touch later on. So far, his daughter loves it and plays with it all the time. She’s starting to learn how some chameleons can change their skin color in order to camouflage — and she’s learning the names of some new colors too!

As always, there’s a demonstration video following the break.

What an awesome dad!

11 thoughts on “Robot Chameleon Teaches Little Girl About Camouflage

  1. Fun idea! However, I’m not sure his daughter will really get any closer to understanding that the main point of the chameleon’s color adaptation ability is blending into the background.. ;) Still very cute toy! :)

    1. I think it’s probably just that their ‘default-state’ colour has evolved to match their preferred habitat, in the same way that non-changey species acquire camouflage…

      Ze’s “Shamma-Leon” is the best way to pronounce that word :D

    1. Because it obviously impossible for anyone to actually understand how to interface the ADC, PWM, SPI, I2C and other periferals of a very low-end, and therefor uncomplicated Atmel microcontroller?

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