What price cat ears?
As a rough estimate, it might take a bit under $500 to make an initial prototype of these mind-controlled cat ears using a MindSet interface and Arduino.1
That’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation which guesses that I’d probably fry some hardware, end up with the wrong motors, and so on.
If, however, I pulled apart a Mattel ‘Mind Flex’ game for parts, then the brain interface and controller component could be had for as little as $130-150.
An unknown factor: how tricky would it be to make the ears? The arduino can control stepper motors, and in the video, the ears seem to simply pivot on a single axis, rather than articulating fully. The only real problem I see is being able to miniaturize and hide the components.
The brain interface might be tricky to tune, but it can’t be that hard. (Famous last words.)
I wonder how hard it would be to do rabbit ears, rather than cat ears, and have the bunny ears droop? (You’d need to have some kind of mechanism to stiffen and relax the ears, rather than pivoting them.)
It’s an interesting thought. I’ve no real plans to invest between two and five hundred dollars and an indefinite amount of time in duplicating someone else’s product.
And yet.
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Incidentally, the latest issue of Make Magazine has a tutorial on doing exactly this. ↩
