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When you want to make a project small you might grab an Arduino Pro Mini instead of a full sized Arduino board but what if your project needs to fit into a blood vessel? F. Levent Degertekin, a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology is developing some miniature technology that will revolutionize how medical doctors will look at the heart and blood vessels. Via: Electronics Lab “The device integrates ultrasound transducers with processing electronics on a single 1.4 millimeter silicon chip. On-chip processing of signals allows data from more than a hundred elements on the device to be transmitted using just 13 tiny cables, permitting it to easily travel through circuitous blood vessels. The forward-looking images produced by the device would provide significantly more information than existing cross-sectional ultrasound. The dual-ring array includes 56 ultrasound transmit elements and 48 receive elements. When assembled, the donut-shaped array is just 1.5 millimeters in diameter, with a 430-micron center hole to accommodate a guide wire.”
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Steve from the Big Mess o’ Wires blog has built a Home Made CPU called the Nibbler. Why the name? Because it is a 4 bit CPU (half of a byte is a nibble). Other than a creative name the project is quite an undertaking, it is built using 7400 logic all wire wrapped up for easy debugging. “Some specs:
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Air Hockey is a fun game, fast paced and can be very challenging with a seasoned opponent. What happens when you build a robot that can move faster than you and calculate where the puck will travel? A robot that is tough to beat! Via: Hack a Day “One of the main problems I’ve had is that the power of the NEMA17 motors are pretty fair for this project and the disadvantage of using stepper motors is that if we lose steps (which can easily happen, for example when the robot hits the puck against the wall) and we do not take into account the missing steps we lose the position of the robot. To fix this, what I’ve done is to use the vision system to detect also the robot (with a different color) so we can detect when the robot has lost steps and fix it.”
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Ok, it isn’t actually not a Long Nose Robot of Death even if that is what it looks like… “What features I want this tank to have?
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If you plan to compete in a knitting competition any time soon you need Agnes the Knit Bot in your corner. Via: Make ”DC motors drive her joints, using homemade gears. In fact, almost every part of her body was handmade, including her silicone face and her hands — latex made from plaster casts of a real person. The original plan had her knitting with needles, but after Noyes learned how to knit himself — a necessary step in his design process — he realized a loom would be easier.”
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This interesting flying machine looks like a Jellyfish flying around. Looks like Mylar film is the choice of lightweight film for these ultra light models. Via: Make ”The prototype has a motor-powered crankshaft that alternately flaps opposing pairs of petal-shaped wings. Though its Mylar film and carbon fiber body weighs less than one-tenth of an ounce, its stability stems from its bottom-heavy design, which lets it wobble, but not flip over. Indeed, its designers argue that the flying jelly is more stable than robots based on insects or birds, which require a tail, sails, or a feedback system to stay upright.”
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When you send off your Gerber files to have your latest board made you will be shipped some shiny new board in a few weeks. The process of creating the boards is very time consuming, the video above goes through the many steps of how a 4 layer PCB is created. Most boards are 2 layer but it is interesting to see how the inner layers of the 4 layer boards are created. It is hard to believe that our boards can be processed through this many steps and be flawless when they are completed since a small mistake on any of these steps would have a good change of damaging the entire thing. |
