If you are into modded consoles have a look at this WiiCube that Hugo Dorison build and sent in.

“It is a heavily modded gamecube, trimmed to fit in a much smaller case than the original, with controls and a screen. It also is equiped with a wiikey fusion, a chip normally made for the wii, that has been adapted. Enabling the portable to play games off of SD cards, and remove the disk drive which takes a lot of space.  As for the case, I built it from scratch using Vaccum forming on sheets of plastic and implementing various pieces of official Nintendo gamecube controllers.”

 Blair Kelly has designed a fun looking RC car. It has an Arduino mounted in the car, there are a number of sensors that allow Blair to drive the car around viewing the drive on a computer screen. There is even force feedback so when the car goes over a large bump or bangs into something he can feel it. With a head mounted display this thing would be very immersive. The camera is mounted so that it can be moved from right to left. I can just imagine what it would feel like if this right and left camera movement was linked to head movements when wearing a head mount display!

Via: Make

If you are getting a bit tired of driving your car manually this hack might be for you. The guys from Waterloo Labs built this car that can be driven around using an iPhone. They are using a CompactRIO controller as the brains of the system which might be considered overkill and does come with a hefty price tag of almost two grand!

Thanks to Jody for sending this one in.

 ”We built our control systems using a few motors, potentiometers, a Compact RIO embedded controller, and LabVIEW. We then set up wi-fi communication so we can drive the car from an iPhone as well as from a modified Power Wheels truck.”

 Thanks to Dieter Sturm for sending in his latest jet powered creation. He is putting the final touches on this Tiny Jet Powered Monster Truck. They are looking for sponsors, so if you are looking to have your name on the side of something cool I suggest you give Dieter a call right away! For his next build I vote to see a Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 stuffed onto the back of a full sized truck.

To see this thing in action be sure to watch the video after the jump.

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Check out this Spooky Animatronic Hand Carved Wooden Head that rosemarybeetle made. I am not sure I could have this  on my side table because I would always be staring at the spooky face. The face carving is very well done, it looks like it should be a museum piece!

“I did not work up detailed design drawings, having decided to let the final look of the head develop as it was carved. For this, I wanted to “sketch” the shape quickly in 3D. For this I used polystyrene which is easy to carve with knives, rasps scalpels or craft knives. 

To control the left/right movement, two flat connectors were attached to the eyeball control rods in a parallelogram frame. These had pivoted joints using small self-tapping screws that could move freely in the rod holes, and anchored into the flat joining rails.”

As you probably know The Pirate Bay is always hiding the location of their servers since governments can often cause a huge speed bump in their activity when they want to. The Pirate Bay Servers might soon be GPS Controlled Drones to allow the server farm to not only not be tied to a building on earth but it could be commanded to fly to a new location in moments. I guess this is one step down from launching a satellite but unlike a satellite these servers can’t be easily located if The Pirate Bay chooses to move the drones around on a regular basis. Of course pirating is wrong I love the innovation that is being considered to evade the authorities!

Via: Ars

“One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.”

 Just like us Sal can look around in his environment so he can watch things that are interesting. Sal uses the iLab Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit to make the magic work. You can also download the code to play around with building your own version of Sal. Thanks for sending this in Lior.

Read more here.

 ”Sal is a robotic head that makes head and eye movements to follow interesting things in its environment (the activity of people and objects in its surroundings). In addition, the head will is capable of locating and recognize visual objects in real time.”