I have been putting the final touches on the Gear Clock kit which is made up of wooden gears. I have a new appreciation of the effort it takes to make something work well when it is constructed out of wood. MechanicalSculptor makes it look easy! This Parabola project us a true work of art, it’s so smooth and repeatable. His work is a real cut above.

This Autopilot for Aerial Photography slide show that was done for Barcamp Antwerp looks really interesting.

“The autopilot has a built in mixer. On first use you need to tell the autopilot what the channel and mixer arrangement of your transmitter/airplane combination is. To put the autopilot in calibration mode, switch on the transmitter, put all sticks in the center and switch channel 6 to “ON”. Now turn on the airplane.
At this point you can calibrate the autopilot by putting all sticks in the center and subsequently actuating the aileron stick from full left to full right and back to center, followed by elevator (fullup, then down, then center), rudder (left, right, center) and throttle (zero throttle, max throttle, center). The autopilot will confirm completion of the procedure by turning the rudder full left, then full right and then back to center.”

This is an inspirational TEDx video of Dennis Hong of RoMeLa. If you think that you recognize his you are right, he was recently chosen as Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10″ for his robotics.

“Dennis Hong is an expert in the area of novel robot locomotion mechanisms, design and analysis of mechanical systems, kinematics and robot mechanism design, humanoid robots, and autonomous systems. He is the inventor of the three-legged walking robot STriDER. He was awarded the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation in 2007.“

Daniel Eindhoven has designed an interesting new Tesla Coil, this Double Resonance Solid State TeslaCoil has a new coil design which has the capacitor bank integrated into the primary coil.  The new coil configuration has been dubbed the Eindhoven Primary.

“A new composition of the primary coil for a Double Resonance Solid State TeslaCoil (DRSSTC). It is a combination of wire and capacitors. By making the coil like this you get rid of all the parasitic inductions of the capacitor bank, it reduces wire length and saves a lot of space. Calculating the resonance frequency also becomes much easier.”

The next installment of the Dune Buggy Electric Conversion project is in. Since we brought you the 1st installment about a month ago there has been lots of work put into it. There are lots of interesting techniques that can be used next time you are working with some high current applications. I like the way the wire lug ends were made rather than bought. The frame is sure to be nice and level since it was laser aligned.

“The tube locations were determined with a laser-level and transcribed to a sheet of plywood. Two more pieces of wood (of the same size) were clamped to the template board, and drilled together to accurately place the holes for the tubing. The plywood sheets were squared and held together with lengths of scrap trim secured diagonally.”

I have used some X10 modules in the past and they work like magic, just plug in the module and you have instant remote control of lighting and appliances. In my case I was controlling the boiler of a 30 suite apartment block and it worked great. Robert Oschler shows us that there are more possibilities when it comes to X10 if you use the SDK, it allows your programs to control your devices using your own software. In this case Robert demonstrates how he can make an X10 Camera Turret Face Tracking system.

“The ActiveHome Professional SDK provides you with OCX server DLLs that run on Microsoft Windows PCs. This allows you to script or program the CM15A transceiver from any scripting or programming language that can interface with ActiveX controls. I used Borland Delphi Professional 6 for the utility I created for this article.

X10 commands are simple English text strings that begin with a command type, followed by a module ID, and then by a command verb—although sometimes there may be a few other parameters after that. For example:

sendplc A1 on
sendplc C1 on
sendrf C1 CamCenter

The command type here for the first two commands is “sendplc” which is used when you want to send a power line command. For the third command it is “sendrf” since the X10 camera turrets respond to RF for movement control. This script would be handy for turning on the lights and the camera and then centering the camera in one fell swoop, possibly for remote viewing at night.”

This robotic platform can be drive from the web. It uses an ioBridge IO-204 to link things together.

“The robot uses a pair of serial bluetooth adapters to form a wireless link with the ioBridge IO-204. The serial levels of the IO-204 are TTL and a circuit using the MAX-232 was required to allow the serial interface work properly. On the robot is a set of serial servo drivers that control the steering and speed.”