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:
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“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. |
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!
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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.
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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 |
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.
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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!
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