So if making a robot that can be remotely controlled wasn’t a tough enough challenge the guys over at Ufactory decided to make one that can roll around on a ball. Great looking design and it sounds like they are going to do a Kickstarter for it and release it as open source hardware to the community. I can’t wait to see a larger version that can be ridden around!

Via: Make

“The hardware may include: Gyro sensor, Accelerometer, Geomagnetic sensor, Wireless module, WIFI module, Camera, Kinect, STM32 MCU, Atmega16 MCU, Brushed DC motor (with gear box), encoder, DC motor driver, Controller power supply and motor power supply.”

 Rohit Gupta needed a way to speed up PCB etching. Heating the etchant and agitating it are both well known ways of speeding up the process. If you are on a DIY budget this normally means you will be stuck sloshing the etchant back and forth for 10 minutes or so. Rohit developed the Open Agitator which uses a CD-ROM Drive Drawer to shake a tray back and forth. A MSP430 microcontroller and an L293D H bridge motor controller are used to power the CD-ROM drive motor, recycled mouse buttons are used as end stop sensors. This is a great project since is simply adds a simple circuit to a platform that most of us have laying around in our junk bins. 

Via: Dangerous Prototypes

The raspberrywebserver.com is running on this Raspberry Pi Cluster Web Server. Visit the site to see all of the details so you can build your own. Steve figures that a 20 Raspberry Pi cluster would be equivalent to a PC server so it isn’t as powerful as a full blown server but it feels very fast and responsive when I tried it!

Via: HG Comments

“Clusters can be used as web servers. Many web sites get too much traffic to run on a single server, so several servers have to be used. Requests from web browsers are received by a node called a load balancer, which forwards requests to worker servers. The load balancer then forwards responses from servers back to the clients.

FozzTexx shows how he built a system that allows a Raspberry Pi to act as a Commodore 64 Disk Drive. His C-64 is tricked out with an Ethernet card so he shows us how he can pull a directory listing from the Raspberry Pi drive and loads an internet browser. It works but isn’t really usable for anything modern. The drive access is very slow due to the speed limitation of the C-64 bus. The software is available for free on Github.

Josh Kiepert built this Raspberry Pi Cluster while at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Boise State. He didn’t want to rely on the stability of the Beowulf cluster at the university while working on his doctoral research so he decided to build his own using 33 Raspberry Pi computers. He has stacked them wired them with a custom power interface so that he can keep the power lines to a minimum, although each system still has an Ethernet cable running out the back of the enclosure.

“I had need of a cluster to run a distributed simulation I’ve been developing. The RPiCluster is the result. Each RPi is overclocked to 1GHz and is running Arch Linux. This demo shows the RPiCluster running a parallel program I developed using MPI to control all of the RGB LEDs installed on each of the nodes.”

Chris Rybitski just shared his latest project with us, it’s a Stage Platform Robot. It is a way to remotely move stage items around. He built a 9 inch tall robot that can drive around with 900 pounds on its back. He built the majority of the metal frame from square tubing that has been welded together. There is an Arduino controlling the robotics and a speed controller that is able to effectively drive the large wheel motors. The user controls the system using a  laptop computer that talks to the platform using a wireless router. The system has some well thought out safety systems such as a proximity sensor that prevents it from running off the stage. This system reminds me of the Amazon robots.

Normally when things need to be manipulated on the stage there is an elaborate setup of winches and cables to pull things into place. This involves some serious preparation. This system will eventually have the ability to be programmed to be commanded to predetermined stage positions, currently the operator remotely drives it into place. If you have some need for something similar be sure to have a look at the code which is available at the bottom of this page.

Are you feeling the hype of Bitcoin yet? Instead of having a full blown computer mining your fortune in Bit Coins why not make solution that can fit in your pocket? The PiMiner Bitcoin Mining System uses USB miners that simply plug into USB ports on the Raspberry Pi.

“Building this project will allow you to use a Raspberry Pi as a ‘headless’ controller and status monitor for your USB bitcoin mining devices. The project incorporates an LCD to display hashrate, error rate, share data, network difficulty, as well as total mining duration/uptime.”