The video above demonstrates what Vijay Kumar and his team are building. We have seen some toy quadcopters that have some impressive capabilities but I can’t wait till a tiny and smart quadcopter as agile as these are available. If you don’t have the time to watch the entire video make sure you see the flight demonstrations at 10:05.

Thanks for sending this in Matt.

 ”In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far more.”

Giorgos Lazaridis from PCBheaven has transformed a discharge mercury gas lamp from his workshop into a powerful UV light source. A UV lamp usually generates UV radiations that cause the internal coating of the surface to glow and produce light. If you have any discharge mercury gas lamp out there in your storage room don’t throw it in the garbage since you can follow Giorgos’s steps for changing it into a powerful UV light source.

“It looks like UV to me! I mean, the lamp originally had a very bright cold white light. Now that i removed the cover, the lamp glows a dark violet color. I only had to re-try cure the UV paint and see the results. So, here are the results: Before i break the glass, with 10 minutes of exposure from a distance of about 30cm, the paint did not cure at all. With the glass removed, from a distance of about 10cm, after 10 minutes of exposure, the paint cured completely. As a matter of fact, the board was over exposured under UV and some paint was cured even under the mask. The difference is obvious. This means 2 thing:

• 1: By removing the glass, the UV radiation is radically increased
• 2: I have to find out what consequences will have the broken glass on the lifespan of this bulb”.

Are you  color blind? Then it would be hard for you to recognize the resistor value while working on projects. Rich Olsan from nothinglabs developed a cool iPhone application for you guys which helps identifying the resistor values through its camera. All you need to do is install application on your iPhone and follow these steps.

“Using resistor ID is easy:

1. Take a photo of a 4-band resistor using the app

2. Drag the numbered bars over the corresponding resistor bands

3. Resistor Photo ID provides you with the resistance and tolerance of the resistor!

If for any reason Resistor Photo ID doesn’t detect the correct color for a band – you can easily override it”.

If you know Minecraft you will get a kick out of this Virtual Weather Station for Minecraft Game. This is actually a weather station named “Minestation” which gets the weather data for Minecraft game using a shield to connect to an Arduino which is connected to a PC via USB while you are playing the game. The video is a must watch to review the details of this amazing weather station. 

Translated page.

“ As the project progressed Minestation decided that would be a shield for Arduino. In this way, based on a widely used platform among us like to tinker with electronics. Thanks to Arduino code we communicate with the “watcher” that analyzes the conditions and real-time data from the game and every 100 milliseconds, we updated data on the screen. After the first tests with prototypes fruitful shield that worked without problems it was decided to make a small run of boards manufactured in series”.

PyroElectro highlights this attention-grabbing PIC 18F4450 based Line Following Robot project by some university students. The main purpose of this embedded system is to follow a line. You can also refer with the description below if you want to pick the idea for your academic projects.

Via: PyroElectro

“This was a second-year Embedded Systems Application Project at university. We were given the hardware and after assembling the robot, had to write firmware for it. The PIC MCU programming was done in C. As it was the first time this course was run, objectives were not concrete and were updated as students progressed. Some of the objectives were: follow a line, go over a ramp and memorize a track.”

Kerry Wong from kerrywong.com shows us how to interface to a MMA8453Q cheap accelerometer using an ATmega328 MCU. There are tons of cool projects out there that are just waiting to be designed using accelerometers!

“MMA8453Q uses the I2C protocol, so I assumed that I could use the default Arduino Wire library. Unfortunately, MMA8453Q uses repeated start condition for the read operations and the default Wire library cannot handle without any modifications. As a result of this, it does not matter which register you try to read from, the returned value is always the content of the status register (at address 0×00) when using the Wire library due to the reset between the write of the register address and the subsequent read. Fortunately, there are alternative I2C libraries available for Arduino that address this issue. And the I2C library I used below is from DSSCircuits”.

The MakerBot Replicator is here! It’s an amazing 3D printer which lets you print 3D objects in different colors. It has dual extrusion now which facilitates printing objects in two different colors simultaneously. Check out what Bre Pettis from MakerBot Industries has said about the new model.

Via: MakerBot Industries

“The MakerBot Replicator™ creates anything you can imagine with the new MakerBot Stepstruder™ MK8, the extruder is the part of the machine that turns raw feedstock, like ABS (what Lego® is made of) or PLA (a biodegradable material made from corn), into the objects you desire. You can order your MakerBot Replicator™ with single or dual MakerBot Stepstruders on it. By choosing the dual extrusion option, you’ll print with two different colors at the same time. MakerBot Dualstrusion™ unlocks the ability to make beautiful combinations of colors and opens the door to experimenting with multi-material objects”.