Someone Made a Hackers DVD Robot

It’s common knowledge that I love the movie “Hackers” and if you haven’t seen it you should…and in the meantime, you might not find the post all that interesting.

For the rest of us: Someone made a tape robot that works the same way as it does in the movie scene where Zero Cool is fighting with Acid Burn over the local TV station!

To jog your memory, or for those weirdos that haven’t seen this masterpiece, here’s the scene from the movie:

Hackaday has a write up. Here’s a blurb:

The whole system is controlled by an ESP32 running FluidNC inside the robot as well as a handmade cyberdeck next to it that manages the overall process of loading and storing tapes. Although [Nathan] is currently using the robot for his streaming channel, he’s planning to also use it for digitizing part of his massive tape collection, which contains a few titles that were never released on newer formats.

On a related note, this scene from “Hackers” has always struck me as odd. Are we to believe that Acid Burn was OK with the racist guy that was on the channel until Zero Cool swapped him for “The Twilight Zone”? While hardly a big flaw in a movie with a lot of, let’s say “quirks,” bit that has always bugged me a bit.