This DIY Animatronic Eye tutorial by PyroElectro might be just the thing your next Halloween project needs!

“This tutorial will present a single method for controlling 2-axis of robotic eye movement using an improvised gimbal system. This will give us control for the animatronic eye to move up and down as well as left and right, just like a human’s eye. Four micro Servo Motors will be used to acuate these movements in the eye. “

I remember before small CNC machines became popular I would see engraving pantograph system in all of the small engraving stores in the mall. They had large letter blocks which could be traced and the result would be a tiny accurate letter engraved onto whatever was under the cutting head. When I first saw the picture of this Electronic Sketching Pantograph by Laura Harris I was wondering what the wires were for since I thought the user would simply trace the images on the right and they would be reproduced on the left on a different scale. Upon further investigation I am quite impressed by the idea. It uses a photo-eye to detect if the paper under the sensor is white or black, when black is present the sketch motor is activated to start sketching with the marker. This is simple and fun looking!

Via: Build Lounge

“It’s a pantograph with an opto-electronically actuated pen. Instead of the tracing stylus that most drawing pantographs use, this one has an optical pickup. You manually scan the pickup over the original art that you want to enlargen and sketchify, using sketching motions in whatever direction you desire (thus the “sketchifier” moniker).

The whole thing runs on 9 VDC and about 300mA when the pen is down. One of the improvements for the next version is to narrow the sensitive area so that smaller features can be resolved.”

Marklar who is a senior member over at the Arduino forums converted a junked radio into a fantastic RGB LED controller. When he looked inside an old radio to salvage some IR parts he spied a Rotary Encoder, these are a bit tricky to setup for the first time but they are great when you are done. For those who aren’t sure what a rotary encoder is, be sure to watch the video that Chris Savage did.

Via: Make

“The concept here is that multiple sets of buttons can be read by a separate analog inputs and can work either in tandem or stand alone.  I do not want to use the memory to store values in an array, so I want to use code to determine the button value instead of a commonly used array look up table.  For this reason I use a callback function to return the button based on the analog value.  A callback is also used when a valid button is pressed.  This allows the code to put into a library and only the base mechanism used.”

Midwest Engineering in Pewaukee Milwaukee has put together a great video showing the robotic technology they implemented for this Robotic Bottling Automation Line to allow it to go from bins of raw goods to a finished product. I am curious how many man hours are needed to keep this machine humming away. I think I would enjoy programming this type of equipment until a customer needed an Automatic Chicken Breast Deboning Robot built!

While at the All Energy 2011 conference in Aberdeen Scotland we stopped by the Langlee Wave Power booth. Thanks to the team from Langlee Wave Power for taking the time to explain how their power generating device works. This system is towed into the ocean and uses the natural undulation of the waves to move some massive water wings. These wings are directly connected to generators to produce energy. It it often the case that the simplest idea is the beast and from what I can see this system is quite simple in concept. Now of course implementation and manufacturability is something completely different. This monster of a system will live its days in the rough seas and will be expected to survive extreme conditions on a daily basis without failure. The upside is that ocean waves are very predictable and this unit can produce 250kW.

“Langlee Wave Power is a Norwegian based company developing wave energy converters for utilizing the power in the waves. The system is optimized for deployment in areas with moderate wave conditions, 2-6 meter seas. The system is ideal for offshore windfarm sites. Power transmission, infrastructure and site approval costs can be shared with new or existing offshore windfarms.”

We are all aware of global warming,but what can we do. I think everyone agrees that we need to make drastic changes to avoid an environmental imbalance. One of these drastic changes was demonstrated to me by Stuart Dunbar from SCI-FUN Fusion at the University of Edinburgh. I met Stuart at the All Energy Conference in Aberdeen Scotland. Their idea is to capture the CO2 gas that would normally be released into the atmosphere by refineries. This captured CO2 would then be pumped into cavities below the sea floor where fossil fuel has previously been removed.

Read more about the Under Sea Carbon Capture and Storage System.

“Methane gas is produced from offshore gas fields, and is brought onshore by pipeline. Using existing oil-refinery technology, the gas is ‘reformed’ into hydrogen and CO2. The CO2 is then separated by a newly-designed membrane, and sent offshore, using a corrosion-resistant pipeline. The CO2 goes to an oilfield and is stored several kilometres below sea level, instead of being vented into the atmosphere from the power station.

In collaboration with the School of Engineering and the Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage, and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the FUSION outreach group has designed and built an interactive CCS model (CCSI), which demonstrates the CCS chain from removal of CO2 to injection. The unit is being taken to schools throughout Scotland as part of the research presentation.”

If you thought all you needed to do was keep an eye out for a van parked outside your house who might be sniffing your Wifi, you better think again. This WASP Drone Plane Sniffs for Open Wifi Networks. Of course it is unmanned and once airborne it can fly a mission by itself hunting down unsecure Wifi networks.

Via: DIY Drones

“At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year’s worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillace Pla…, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae.”