Milan Gajic has made a cool Web controlled floppy drive powered pan cam. Some simple right and left commands on this page allow anyone on the net to have the floppy drive move the camera around to get look out of Milan’s window.

Note: It seems that the cam only works with Internet Explorer at this time.

“The goal of the game was to make a webcam panning unit out of things I had lying around on my table. Then this would be made accesible via a web interface, so that a person watching the webcam images could move the camera. A floppy drive, as I discovered earlier, has a easily usable steppermotor and a builtin controller. The idea is to use the linear movement of the Read/Write head of the floppy drive to rotate a camera mount. To do this I connected the RW-head to a point on the camera mount that was slightly off axis. The distance bitween the axis of the camera mount to the point where force is applied should be about half of full linear movement of the RW-head.”

These are open source robots called e-puck, look like lots of fun. A little out of the hobbyist budget at $700, but for a research platform that is cheap!

“The main goal of this project is to develop a miniature mobile robot for educational purposes at university level. To achieve this goal the robot needs, in our opinion, the following features:
* Good structure. The robot should have a clean mechanical structure, simple to understand. The electronics, processor structure and software has to be a good example of a clean modern system.
* Flexibility. The robot should cover a large spectrum of educational activities and should therefore have a large potential in its sensors, processing power and extensions. Potential educational fields are, for instance, mobile robotics, real-time programming, embedded systems, signal processing, image or sound feature extraction, human-machine interaction or collective systems.
* User friendly. The robot should be small and easy to exploit on a table next to a computer. It should need minimal wiring, battery operation and optimal working confort.
* Good robustness and simple maintenance. The robot should resist to student use and be simple and cheap to repair.
* Cheap. The robot, for large use, should be cheap (450-550 euros)”

Via: Robot Gossip

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