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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.“ |
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Bradley Rigdon who owns Print To 3D shows us how he can print a cool bearing with his 3D printer. This printer is a bit different than the Makerbot that we have featured here before. His Dimension 3D printer uses uses 2 types of material, one that makes the structure of the item and a second material that can be dissolved after the model has been printed. See the videos below for an inside view of the system. The last video illustrates the power of having a dissolvable second plastic material, a functional Rubik’s Cube like game is printed with no assembly needed! Bradley is an avid RC hobbyist, he shares some video of his collection here and here.
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You think the guitar you own is high tech? Well does it have a 500MHz processor? Can you even SSH into it? I thought not. This MISA - Touch Pad Digital Guitar is packed with tons of technology but thankfully it outputs MIDI so you can just jack it into your existing gear and jam away. Thanks Michael “The guitar itself is CNC machined out of solid ABS plastic. This is an extremely solid body, not like injection moulded plastic which is thin, lightweight and hollow. The screen is an 8.4″ LCD 800×600 resolution. The CPU is a 500MHz x86 compatible AMD Geode which makes life easier, I guess. The operating system is Gentoo Linux which I’ve stripped down to be as lean as possible. Graphics (framebuffer access) is done with DirectFB which acts as a fast layer on top of the hardware. The neck is 144 “keycaps” sitting on top of a special keymat that I had tooled. They are not pressure sensitive - but I made the decision early on not to include this because I don’t feel it is neccessary, it would make the instrument harder to play and less reliable.”
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This NicoletoMK Mikrokopter Quadrocopter is not your department store variety flying toy. This 4 blade Quadrocopter is powerful enough to lift a 500 gram payload, this means camcorders, cameras or water balloons are fare game for this machine. It can be flown by an operator or run in autonomous mode which would make it great as an automated surveillance system. There is a video of the unit in operation here and pictures of it in flight here.
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What does it take to pimp out a Range Rover Sport into a limo? A little more than a paint and polish that’s for sure! Have a look at some of the build pictures that Midlands Limos sent in below for an idea of how invasive the process is. Next time I ‘m in the UK I will have to have a ride in this limo!
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We mentioned before that Fletchtronics will be building a bunch of Bumble Bs and sharing the process with us. Well the creation of the devices are done and the videos are finished. Watch them for some tiny surface mount techniques. I haven’t played with a Bumble B before but we have featured a project that was built with the $17 controller. What is a Bumble B you may ask, here is a description from the site. “It is a breakout board for Atmel’s at90usb162 microcontroller, along with supporting hardware and USB connector. It is DIP-24/600mil shape, and works very well on a breadboard. You can program Bumble-B without any special hardware and using entirely free and open source software from Atmel and the AVR community. This makes Bumble-B a self-contained AVR development kit that you can start working with instantly, with no special tools.” Day 2 Video
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Frank from The Workshop.ca is back at it, the Suzuki Electric Bike project wasn’t a big enough challenge I guess.
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The new project is the