Tapescape and Tapelake - 2 Cassette-Based Robots Meet for the First Time

At Maker Faire last week, my booth had the TapeScape robot on display (which I made with Ilan Schifter - made almost completely out of a tape deck, broadcasting the sound from the "scape" of "tape" it would roll over), prompting several people to mention that there was a very similar robot inside the Queens Hall of Science.

I had to check it out for myself, and had the pleasure of meeting Dan Perrone. His project is not only very similar to TapeScape in it's design and action, but has quite a similar name: TapeLake.

It turns out that we developed our projects independently of each other, but came to similar conclusions, and are both Brooklyn residents. As Dan said "We're all the same fleas on different dogs."

See video below of our encounter:

But I'm only a hardware hacker....

The Tapescape Audio Robot

Keeping in the spirit of this blog, I should mention that I'm the co-creator of a robot that was built almost solely from a dual tape deck and could transmit sound from a "scape" of "tape" as it rolled along. This was called TapeScape -

After moving out of NYC after my tenure as bassist for Kinetic was over, this was the first major "maker" project I undertook with my collaborator, Ilan Schifter (who encouraged me to enroll at NYU's ITP program.) We originally entered the robot into an Instructables contest, and then received attention from several well-known blogs.

It was after this that the gears started turning for this website idea. It excites me immensely to know that there is "obsolete" technology and materials languishing, just waiting for others like myself to snatch it up and re-imagine it as something fantastic!

If you have ideas along these lines, I'd love to hear what you've been doing. If you have something laying around and don't know what to do with it, let me know, and we can think of something. Cheers!