Yes, I know 'funnest' isn't technically a word. But, what is the funniest, craziest, most amusing thing you've done with a robot/microprocessor (intentionally or not)?

Hands down, the funniest thing I've ever been a part of was a hackmod my classmates and I did back in college. Basically we took a Hello Kitty doll, tore it apart, and Frankenstein'd (I'm just making up words on the fly today) in an infrared range sensor (one eye of the doll was the LED, the other eye was the phototransistor), a small speaker, an Arduino Duemilanove, and a small electronic airsoft mechanism we had pulled out of a 1/16th scale RC tank. The 'thing' was hilarious. It had the classic Hello Kitty cuteness but a giant, metallic barrel sticking out of its chest and staples running up its back to keep all the fluffy goodness in. Whenever someone would walk in front of it, it would emit a diabolical laugh and fire off a few rounds at them.

We put it in on a desk in front of the main door to the lab during open house. Good times were had

Anyone else have some crazy stories about things you've built 'just because'? I know you do, don't hold out on us now...

We are doing a project this summer (read: just started, not yet finished) in which we got a Stampede Nerf gun, mod it so that it can be hooked up to a robot (see picture of the Nerf gun). We are going to mount the gun using a pan and tilt gimbal onto the robot. We will also mount a camera on the gun so the robot can "see its targets". Then code will be written to use the camera to track "targets". The robot will acquire target and point the gun at it no matter where it moves and fires. Initially, the code will track a rectangular target so we can reuse the vision code from the FRC Rebound Rumble game without much change. Eventually, we will try to track other objects. In the future, we may even try to connect a Microsoft Kinect to it so it can really track people.

I made a Tweeting robot back in 2009 to check on my dogs' barking while we were out and it turned out so much worse than we though:
http://twitter.com/#!/XandersNXT
The worst one:

Needless to say we went out and bought one of those ultrasound anti-barking doodads afterwards and it's been much better since

I wrote an article about it, which you can read here: [LINK]

- Xander