Castello di Amorosa

May 15, 2025April 26, 2025 Lutin

Ever wish a medieval castle was just a drive away? In you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can visit Castello di Amorosa . It is in Sacramento just two hours away.

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga

We sometimes need to break from the workshop and Castello di Amorosa is one of our favorite to refill our creative well.

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga Court yard

The attention to detail is astounding and having visited castle in Europe they capture the feel.

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga Hall way

Dark and spooky corridors can be found to given you inspiration and chills.Sometimes you can find hidden passageways in it .

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga Knight

Beautiful murals and statues are found throughout the castle.There is so much detail to the murals! We love looking at them. Sometimes we might even sketch them to bring inspiration.

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga Knight

Here is a suit of armor stand ready for action. In the backround you can see a beautiful mural that shows the nights going into battle.

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga Gift shop

Everything has the perfect patina to give it a timeless and well-worn look.The tiles in this image are skillfully decorated with intricate patterns.

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga downstairs

Here are some more dimly lit corridors.

Castello di Amorosa: Napa Valley Castle Winery in Calistoga View from the front

Hope you find inspiration!

Wood Sculpture: Cat

May 8, 2025May 8, 2025 Lutin

This cute little wooden cat was a quick build from some leftover pieces. We wanted a simple toy that would be sturdy and easy to build, but would also look like a cat. All of the wood was harvested from our yard.

Wooden toy cat

For the tail and legs we like to keep the bark on to give it a rustic look. The texture would also look like fur.

Wooden toy cat

The head, tail and legs are attached using wire to make it poseable. To do this, we drill small holes in each on the limbs, and used the wire like a peg. There is no glue in the whole figurine.

Happy Creating!

Maker Fest at Ecole Bilingue in Berkeley

April 29, 2025April 29, 2025 Lutin

The Hip Monsters team was thrilled to be invited to a Maker Fest last week at Ecole Bilingue in Berkeley, CA. Ecole Bilingue is a preschool to eighth grade French immersion school focused on preparing their students to make a positive impact on the world.

We had a wonderful time and it was amazing to see such talented makers and dedicated students. The event had great food (including handmade boba tea), a fun crowd and an exciting lineup of makers. It was a beautiful day in Berkeley which added to the cheer.

Below are just some of the makers at the fest.

Hip Monster’s Robot Freedom

We were there with Number Three of RobotFreedom fame, who got a chance to test out her new legs. We will have a post in a bit on her leg redesign. Te legs worked well and the batteries lasted long than we anticipated.

We also brought our pneumatics demonstration which is an ideal place to start kids (and adults) on robotics.

The Sewing Corner

There was a great sewing section with helpful makers who quickly got even first time sewers make a tote bag.

Here is a finished toto bag! We have already put it to good use storing cat toys.

Magnification Mayhem vs. Resolution Rumble!

George and Janai Southworth from the San Francisco Microscopical Society had a fantastic demonstration of microbiology. They showed how different filters and lightning impacted what could be viewed through the microscope. Below is a petri dish of bacteria waiting to reveal its secrets.

Solar Racing Car

Members of the UC Berkeley CalSol Solar Racing Car were there giving us the inside scoop on their upcoming race in Nashville, TN. Every few years the car is completely redesigned and rebuilt using the most up to date technology.

3-D Print Making

There was 3D printing space with a great collection of designs and examples. And all the designs were coded by kids!

And ere is out favorite design, a 3D printed pink bunny.

Bike Powered Smoothies

The bike powered smoothie machines were steampunk inspired pieces of art. They were designed and made by the talented students at Ecole Bilingue. They also are a great way to make sure you earn those calories in the smoothie. Every household should have one of these!

The designs are modified stationary bike with blender connected to the front wheel.

Here are the bikes in action making a smoothie.

Painting Robot

They even had a robot making art! It was fun watching the robot as it dutifully created its next masterpiece.

Here is a view of the business end of the painter bot.

Space Wars

And last but not least, a RaspberryPi powered game console designed a built by one of the students. The compact design had custom made controllers that allowed for two person games.

The stand was a clever design using a cardboard box as a case neatly cut so it looked.

Find your inspiration!

First Robotics Competition in SF

April 9, 2025April 7, 2025 Lutin

We had a lot of fun at the First Robotics Competition at St Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco CA. We cannot think of a better way to spend the weekend than watching teams of highly skills robotics engineers compete for fame and glory!

Above is a photo the entrance to St Ignatius located in the heart of the Sunset district in San Francisco.

Below is a video showing one set of the robotic competition.

The goal is for your team to finish as many tasks as possible before the time runs out. Each team has three robots: two that are focused on competing tasks and one that tries to disrupt the other team’s robots. The court is divided in two with each team having one side as their home where they perform their tasks. The tasks are placing the tubes in a slot, throwing a ball and lifting themselves up at the end of the round.

Here is a close up of one of the robots, number 6822. It is amazing to see how many different and creative designs the teams come up with. For example, some receive the tubes from feeding machine while others scoop them up from the floor.

Here is another robot, 7667, waiting to be serviced.

Above is a photo of a typical repair station. Like with the robots, each team has their own layout and collection of tools optimized for their robot’s design. We had serious tool envy as we walked through the pit.

While none of our photos have people, the event was crazy crowded. We made sure to exclude people when taking photos, so missed about half of the teams at the events. Below is a sample of some of the teams there.

The Otter Bots.

The Aztechs from Alameda, California.

And team 846 with the absolute coolest pin dispenser ever!

The Breaker Bots.

The Pirate Robolution!

The Bot-Provoking.

Bora Robotics from Türkiye!

Blue Magpies from Taiwan!

Find your inspiration!

A Selection of Wands

March 21, 2025March 22, 2025 Lutin

We make wands to relax and to practice our woodworking skills. The process usually involves spokeshaving, sanding, staining, and waxing the wood. We always use wood from our yard to make the wands extra unique. Here is a selection of some of our wands!

This piece of wood had a handle that bends that was very difficult to spokeshave, but turned out very well. We stained it red and brown then sanded the wood for the marbled finish.

Unusual for us, this wand is made from bamboo. Instead of spokeshaving, we just sanded this wand to maintain the classic look of the bamboo. The black color of the wood is natural, not stained.

This wand is nice and strait. We spoke shaved it smooth and stained it mahogany to add a pop of color. This wand was also sanded to have a smooth finish.

Happy creating!

Paxton Gate

March 17, 2025March 12, 2025 Lutin

Whenever we go to Valencia Street in San Francisco, we always go to one of our favorite stores called Paxton Gate. An eye catching store that is full of interesting natural wonders and oddities.

When we go in Paxton Gate we always will stay there for a very long time, because there is so much to see and explore!

Here are some interesting rocks and minerals, including opal, aragonite, and bismuth! We love to pick out some new and interesting rocks to add to our rock collection.

Here are some more rocks! We love looking at and picking up all of the different rocks. One particular favorite is a desert rose crystal. We like then because they are very beautiful and remind us of a rose. We also love bismuth because it reminds us of Gunnerkrigg Court.

Here are some animals and other random curiosities that are preserved in glass. There is even a human brain in a jar!

These are animals displays and animal figurines. We love to look through all of the animal figurines to try and find our favorite animals.

These are some cool skeletons and bones of different animals, including the skull of a muskrat.

Paxton Gate also has a variety of plants. We love to hang out in the plant section to try and find a new addition for the yard.

More plants! The weirder the plant the better. We love to have odd looking plants in our garden.

Here are some fossil trilobites, ancient creatures that lived in the ocean. There are a variety of sizes. We are especially interested in them because trilobites are the family sign for the Heterodyne family in Girl Genius.

Here are some glass eyes used for taxidermy which we find creepy but cool.

These strange stones are actually owl pellets! Owl pellets are undigested food that an owl would regurgitate.

And a friendly skeleton watches over the store while you explore!

We hope you find you inspiration!

Street Art in Taipei

February 1, 2025February 2, 2025 Lutin

While visiting Taipei we went to the Wanhua district, famous for its amazing street art. It is located in Taipei’s oldest district and is surrounded by history, great food and shopping. While San Francisco, CA has a great collection of murals, we were not prepared for how unique, large, and pristine the street art was in Taipei. In New York and San Francisco there is often layers upon layers of graffiti often obscuring one another in a jumble of imagery. In Taipei, most of the street art was unstructured making you feel like you were walking through a museum rather than an alley. We would see often time see people slowly walking doing an alley as if strolling a museum, pausing at a piece of street art that caught their imagination. Below is a collection of our favorites.

This is a view of the alley call America Street in the Wanhua district where we found most of the art. It is a fun art focused district to visit.

This four-eyed creature in an Elmo costume. We saw three different versions of this image throughout the city.

Painted by De_24, this amazing bunny is also frequently seen throughout Taipei. You can check out more of De_24 here.

This creative flying cat is painted by Psoman.

This 3-eyed creature is painted by Binzilla.

The artist is unknown.

The artist is unknown.The artist is unknown.

The artist is unknown.

Street art made by Alex Face near a park in Taipei.

Maker Faire Bay Area Robot’s View

November 4, 2024November 30, 2024 Lutin

Thanks to everyone who helped this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area be so special! We are looking forward to seeing everyone next year and are already improving our show. Below is a photo our booth before the event started. It is hard to believe over one thousand people visited us over the course three days!

Want to see how our autonomous robots experienced Maker Faire Bay Area? Check out the video below, generated based on the stimuli, emotions, and actions of HipMonsters’ two robots over the course of three days at the Maker Faire.

The robots recorded the following sensory data:

💙 Noise: A sudden, loud noise. Represented by the color Blue.

💚 Distance: Motion within 1 foot. Represented by the color Green.

🧡 Movement: Motion within 6 feet. Represented by the color Orange.

💛 Speech: The spoken word “robotics”. Represented by the color Gold.

💗 Touch: Contact on the touch sensor. Represented by the color Pink.

🤖 Frequency of Stimuli: How often or rarely the robots received stimuli. Captured by the Movement of the cube.

🔉 Mood: Happy or overstimulated. Reflected in the choice of Sound.

Turn up the volume of the video! It’s not music you’re hearing, but the robots’ moods given the stimuli.

Since we engaged the Touch sensor at the end of each demo, this means we ran 420 complete demos over 3 days. Our robots have been well socialized!

Happy Creating!

AI as Art

September 28, 2024October 13, 2024 Lutin

When designing Robot Freedom, our educational presentation on robotics, the HipMonsters team wanted to make robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) approachable to a mass audience in hopes of inspiring the creators within all of us. To achieve this, the core principles for our AI design were defined by the Hip Monster’s sister team (ages 9 and 12 at the time), namely, robots should have distinct personalities, emotions, curiosity and be first and foremost pieces of art.

Given these principles, the foundation of our artificial intelligence framework (show above) is based on Stimulus Organism Response (S-O-R) Theory. S-O-R theory is a psychological framework that enables researchers to explore how stimuli (such as a bell) can impact an organism’s responses, (a dog salivating). Like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell, our robots learn and adapt as they experience outside stimuli and are always eager for more. The robot’s AI is driven by five personality traits that govern how they interpret and respond to stimuli. Below is how a signal from a sensor (stimuli) flows through our AI (organism) and results in an action (response).

Central to the robot’s stimuli exploration is a sensor array of ten sensors ranging from sound to touch. When a robot receives a stimulus, it first processes the information based on its preset personality, then uses past experiences to choose a response based on its personality. Below is a color key to the robot’s sensor display panel.

These experiences are weighted based on the outcome of the robot’s actions allowing the robot to adapt responses to new stimuli. The robots can move, change visual effects, or talk using a chatbot. Below is the full software stack used in our robots.

All the processing is run on a Raspberry Pi and you can download if on our GitHub. Come see this in action at this year’s Bay Area Maker’s Faire!

Happy creating!

Project 75762- Maker Faire 2024!

August 28, 2024October 14, 2024 Lutin

We are delighted to say the Hip Monsters will present Robot Freedom at the this year Bay Area Maker Faire!

Robot Freedom is a celebration of robotics and steampunk designed to teach kids of all ages the basics of robotic design with fun hands-on demonstrations presented by an autonomous android powered by feelings. See how a mechanical mind works, power a music robot with your own strength, and watch how a robot sees a world filled with stimuli!

Please join us October 18 through 20th!