#idea#video
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Idea: Autonomous hair clippers that detect where they are on your head, and automatically change the guard length to allow users to give themselves a perfect haircut within minutes. The project has two main parts:
- modified hairclippers with a motorized guard and sensors
- application that allows user to select what type of haircut they want, and handles processing for realtime changes
I worked on this project heavily in March 2024, and made significant progress with my friend Chinemerem. We got to a place where we could give haircuts, but there were consistent problems preventing us from achieving our final goal: a fresh 1 minute fade.
Mainly 2 things:
- It’s an insanely hard problem to try and get the 3d position of something in such a granular fashion without external sensors (something that is important to me)
- Mechanical backlash is the enemy of cutting hair especially because even a mm makes a difference
I was a bit too embarrassed to show this before, but I think it’s pretty funny that I convinced my friends to try cutting their hair before my own. Things like accidentally giving my friend a reverse fade because of a software bug. Or giving another friend the craziest -1/10 haircut of his life.
Updates - Jan 2025
It’s now 8 months later and this has been one of my favourite projects I’ve ever worked on. This is mainly for a couple reasons:
- I can see immediate practical use for technology like this. Imagine if you had to go to the dentist every time you wanted to brush your teeth. That is the current state of cutting hair.
- It was an interesting engineering problem. It spanned both hardware and software and required a lot of critical thinking and ingenuity to get to the place that we are, and will require a lot more to get further.
- It’s playful!
It was originally my dream to make a YouTube video out of this project. I filmed a lot for it, but the truth is, it never got to the position that I wanted it to be. I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on it and countless weeks of effort. But now, looking at this project again, while it’s staring at me, I can’t help but think about giving it another shot.
My goal is to actually get that fresh one minute fade and finally be able to put out the YouTube video. The video will contain a technical deep dive, but more importantly a story, lasting more than a year, about how some uni kids became obsessed with cutting hair.
Materials
Note, I used to be in Waterloo, which had easy access to a makerspace. Just a couple minutes walk away. Right now I am doing the residency in New York. And, as a result, don’t have easy access to a makerspace. So I have to buy some of the fundamental components to build things like power supplies and other stuff.
| Item | Price (USD) |
|---|---|
| High Quality Clipper | $30 |
| 2x Low Quality Clipper | $10 (total) |
| 2 kg of 3D Printing Filament | $40 |
| 2x 20 kg Servo Motors | $60 (total) |
| Linear Actuator with Position Sensor | $130 |
| 3x ESP32 | $20 (total) |
| Power Supply | $40 |
| Calipers | $10 |
| Soldering Station | $60 |
| Consumables (nuts, bolts, solder, wiring, perf boards) | $70 |
| Small Stepper Motor | $30 |
| AirPods for head tracking | Already Have |
| iPhone | Already Have |
| Total | $500 |
Tracking sensors depending on what tracking method ends up working best. Will start with just an iphone and then go through this list. As I add more sensors, will do sensor fusion as well. Hopefully I don’t have to end up testing all of these, but I’ll give myself a $500 budget for sensors because I’ll have to try multiple and they tend to get expensive.
| Method | Sensor Type | Sensor Name | Approximate Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inertial Measurement | IMU | Adafruit 9-DOF Absolute Orientation IMU Fusion Breakout - BNO055 | $34.95 |
| Optical Tracking | Depth Camera | Intel® RealSense™ Depth Camera D435 | $179.99 |
| Optical Tracking | Stereo Camera | MYNT EYE Stereo Camera | 399 |
| Optical Flow Tracking | Optical Flow Sensor | PixArt PMW3901 Optical Flow Sensor | 30 |
| Ultra-Wideband (UWB) | UWB Positioning System | Pozyx UWB Developer Kit | 1,000 |
| Electromagnetic Tracking | 3D Magnetic Sensor | Allegro 3DMAG™ Position Sensor | Contact for pricing |
| Electromagnetic Tracking | 3D Magnetic Sensor | Infineon 3D Magnetic Sensor | Contact for pricing |
| Capacitive Sensing | Touch Sensor | MPR121 Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout | $7.50 |
| Radio Frequency (RF) | RF Tracking System | DecaWave DW1000 UWB Transceiver Module | $29.99 |
Total Budget: $1000
Paths forward:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67874fd2-ffc4-8000-9616-51186e67da43 https://www.ti.com/lit/ab/sbaa512b/sbaa512b.pdf?ts=1736921266820 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2290/1/012082/pdf https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9651683 https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/13yobhj/quest_3_controller_tracking_explained_in_boz_ama/