So, didja all have a good Holiday Break? Yeah, we did too. Need a vacation to recover from the vacation... Enough chit-chat: Just a quick note to let you know we're expecting a bit of an outage January 6th at 2am MST (that's -7GMT, I think). Our server is being affected by an upstream upgrade […]
Wednesday Cool Links: Spiderbot, Solar S...
Dave Hrynkiw
October 17, 2012
It's Wednesday! Hooray! Huzzah! We're celebrating because... Well, ok, we have nothing big to celebrate right now. So we're going to celebrate having nothing to celebrate with the traditional and only appropriate way possible... BROWSING THE INTERNET! Indeed, we've been celebrating this time-honoured tradition with steadfast dedication, and it's our pleasure to share it with all of you.
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Four-Legged Spiderbot As the website puts it, this is "a walking machine, radially symmetrical, having four legs with two degrees of freedom each, controlled through a wireless link from a hand-held controller based on two Wii Nunchucks." Very impressive articulation and range of motion. Be sure to check out the video. |
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The Almost Useless Machine A solar-powered... Reciprocating saw? Make sure you have lots of patience and a cold one to enjoy while you "work"! Seriously though, while this might not be too functional, it certainly has some great craftsmanship. |
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Solar "Death Ray": Power of 5000 suns! Mirrors. Lots of mirrors. 5800 of them, to be precise. It's pretty cool (and a LOT scary) what kind of power can be harnessed by arranging mirrors onto a fiberglass satellite dish and aligning it to the sun. |
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6 Rubens Tubes Visualizer Hrm, a flame visualization for music? SIGN ME UP. Turn it into a handy-dandy plug-in accessory for the iPod, for the best on-the-go pyrotechnics you can possibly imagine. Might want to make sure you turn it off before tucking it away in your pocket, though. |
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Solar Engineer Badge on DIY So, you think you like DIY? Well, it's time to prove your chops by completing challenges over at diy.org. They even have a Solar Engineer Badge that features a bunch of project ideas, including our Instructable for the Solar Powered Miniball. |
We were once hoping that we could instead celebrate by racing giraffes through obstacle courses, but that didn't pan out. Too bad. I was planning on decking mine out with some sweet black and white racing stripes, to make it look like a very oddly proportioned zebra.
MORE POSTS
20 Years of BEAM Technology
A little while ago we received an email from an observant Mr. Pavel Ryabinkov, the site-admin of www.myROBOT.ru, who was asking us to relay a question to Mark Tilden: Could you answer, can it be considered the official date of birth BEAM-robotics November 10, 1989?I was basing this question on the message Brian O. Bush: […]
PDXBot Video
We just received an inventory of PDXBot.04 DVDs that we're selling in part to raise funds for the Portland Area Robotics Society (PARTS). It's a pretty hefty video - over 2 hours long, with many features, including a few cameos of "The Dave and Grant Show" (we were there competing last year). It's a good […]
Shok Circuits
Here's a little something from Grant in the development lab - a very simple pair of circuits based on Mark Tilden's Bicore Shok architecture. This circuit makes for a very simple, effective Photovore robots, or even a photo-head. Take a look - schematics & parts listed included! We've also added a gallery entry for these […]
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