Some people are able to solve a Rubik’s Cube very quickly, there are even lots of robots that can solve them much faster than people can. Well this new system is crazy fast. Less then a half second to solve the cube. The motors need to be very strong and fast to push the system to this speed. This means that the moves have to be exacting or else it is sure destruction of the cube. They have some dramatic examples of that in the videos below!

“The contraption is built from:

• 6 Kollmorgen ServoDisc U9-series motors.  2 were taken from my old robot arm project, the rest were found pretty cheaply on ebay.  Each motor has a US Digital optical encoder on the back, also purchased for a bargain on ebay.
• 6 custom motor drivers.
• 2 PlayStation Eye cameras
• 1 Rubik’s Cube.  One of the cheapest available“

A Nixie Tube is an old piece of technology, Dalibor Farný has resurrected the old technology by working through the techniques to build new tubes by hand. The video shows the tedious process of the low volume creation of them. Lots of complex mechanical steps are needed from spot welding to glass blowing is needed.

“The nixie tube is a vintage display device which had been used until 70s when it was replaced with LED displays. The complex knowledge of manufacture of nixie tubes literally died with tube factory’s engineers, glassblowers and machine operators.
I discovered nixie tubes in 2011 and since then, I’ve devoted all my time to studies of nixie tubes and its manufacturing processes. After years of intensive work, with help of many people, I eventually succeeded and have revived the knowledge and equipment for production of nixie tubes.”

We have seen some food robots before. Looks like we might be on the verge where the robots are going to be used for what they are good for such as show in the video where the robot spreads pizza sauce perfectly or can finally pick apples as good as a human. Just as in any industry when simple tasks such as flipping a burger is automated some of these jobs will be replaced. However fewer high tech jobs will replace the simple jobs since the robotic systems will now need to be installed, repaired and monitored. How long will it be before gas stations and fast food restaurant have no onsite employees. I think it could be soon!

Scotty from Strange Parts known for building his own iPhone has been busy with another iPhone project. As most people know the Apple iPhone got rid of the headphone jack and even though many people hate that decision it looks like Apple will not be bringing it back. After 4 months of designing and Scotty was finally able to replicate the functionality of the normal headphone jack functionality. Of course this would be possible to be done anywhere but being in the heart of the electronic marketplace in China sure helps. For example he was able to get things like flex PCBs made by walking over to the local PCB sales booth. See the video below for an interview Serpentza did with Scotty.

We have seen safe cracking robots before but they never get old. The guys at Spark Fun made a great one. It would be funny to  see a CCTV video of a vault heist that uses some technology like this. The safe cracker could setup his rig and read a magazine while the technology did the hard work.

Via: Adafruit

 
“Nathan Seidle’s wife gave him this already locked safe as a gift with no combination. Weird present, but he loves a good challenge. So he built a safecracking robot.”
 

Rachel Dipirro and Jonathan Lo made an interesting Talking Multimeter Project for their Cornell University ECE 4760 Final Project. The multimeter is built around a PIC32MX250F128B. This is not a robust product that will be replacing your desktop multimeter since the range is not that great. For example it can just read resistance between 0 and 50K and voltage up to 10 volts. This range is fine for lots of work and the measurement front end could easily be swapped out with a high resolution ADC to greatly enhance this.

The multicolor LCD display is a great way to display the output and the number pad is perfect to control the system but of course the heart of this project is the voice output. The speech synthesis is performed by transmitting data to an external Microchip MCP4822 SPI DAC, the samples that are played are 16kHz samples that were compressed and stored onto system flash.

Tiny Circuits have made a playable Tiny Arcade Cabinet kit. The environment is a tiny custom Arduino system. It is stackable and of course very small.

“The Tiny Arcade lets you relive the golden age of video games with an arcade cabinet that fits in the palm of your hand.  Originally launched on Kickstarter!

• Beautiful, vibrant full color OLED screen  
• Games are free and open source – play community made games or write your own
• SD card expansion slot – download new games and insert card (or get a preloaded microSD card here)
• High quality joystick and two push buttons
• Built-in speaker with volume control knob and rechargeable lithium battery
• USB port for charging and game development
• Clear and Black Acrylic
• Arcade stickers to decorate your cabinet
• Electronics based around the same 32-bit ARM processor as the Arduino Zero “