Wednesday Cool Links, Announcements and ...

Solar botics
September 11, 2013

We were at the San Mateo MakerFaire, and were representing for BPS breadboards. They've announced their winners, and the first place went to  Elizabeth from Houston, Texas (age 11) (and we like unicorns too):

Now that we have established our stance towards robotic (roboCorns) and regular unicorns (unicornus vulgaris), here's some links. They are just as magical:

Fletcher Tables
This is definitely out of garage-duct tape-hot glue DIY range, but the craftsmanship is amazing, especially it's worth seeing it in motion, check out the video.
Robosans: Robot Made Digital Typography
An intersection of typography and robotics, a font created by manipulating the controller on the OWI robotic arm.
Completely analog electronic music box
An analog music box [Steven Dufresne], that uses 555 timer and can generate 13 different tones. Electronically simple and mechanically elegant solution. And it plays music!
NES: Nixie Entertainment System
Tiny nixies are fun! Nintendo emulator combined with a nixie clock by [Bradley W. Lewis] is all kinds of retro-tastic.
Watch JPL's RoboSimian Do Pull-Ups
We've seen lots of articulated robots, but this one eerily resembles a simian, with all four limbs capable of mobility and manipulation.

Oh, do I ever wish I had a roboCorn to hold things, for example as my coat rack... But isn't that a waste of unicornal resources? Dear Elizabeth from Houston, Texas, please build one for me, I would find a good use for it.

And before I conclude, wanted to mention that Solarbotics will have a booth at the MakerFaire YYC at Alberta College of Art+Design on September 13 and 14, with the various electronic goodies and the Arduino workshop. Also noteworthy are our fellow Calgary manufacturers - BPS, the makers of prototyping boards, who I mentioned at the beginning of this post in relation to the unicorns. They (not unicorns, the BPS!) will also be doing  a demo on using C Programming for AVRs/Arduinos and a demo on using breadboards.

See y'all (or some) there!

MORE POSTS

April 4, 2006
Solarbotics at the MAKE Faire

Sooo, if you're not familiar with Make Magazine, you should be! An excellent quarterly "bookzine" from O'Reilly publishing - them guys that do the computer books with the ink-line drawings of animals on the cover. I'll be down there this April 22-23, giving BEAM lectures / workshops at their MAKE Faire in San Francisco, and […]

February 9, 2011
Interesting Mini-sumo build

This mini-sumo design by Jeremy Bloyd-Peshkin features our wheels, and one of our favourite building materials, Sintra. We can't laser-cut sintra (PVC=bad stuff when burned), but milling it works well, as this builder shows. The asymmetric motor layout works, as proven by this contest-winning design (scroll to the bottom of the page).

February 5, 2010
Temperature Sensors, New Instructable

Woo, we've had a busy week! To start things off, we have a new category - Temperature Sensors! So far it has the following items: Humidity/Temperature Sensor DS1620+ Serial Digital Thermometer DS18B20+ Temperature Sensor Devantech TPA81 8x1 Thermopile LilyPad Temperature Sensor Yeah, it's a pretty bare category at the moment, but we'll be adding to […]

November 12, 2002
New Product!

We've been shopping again, but the accountant won't let us hoard all the goodies for ourselves. SOOO, we're announcing the following goodies! RBFB: The Book "Robot Building for Beginners" by David Cook, which is an excellent reference for a newcomer to robotics. It's an ideal companion for our own book "Junkbots, Bugbots, and Bots on […]

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