Bruce Land is showing off the hard work of his students in his Cornell University ECE 4760 Designing with Microcontrollers class. I hope you have a long lunch hour since it will take you a long time to go through all 35 projects. I found this Mechanix Motorized Guitar Tuner real interesting. Nice thing about all of these projects is the great documentation.

See the full list of projects 

"The Mechanix is a motorized guitar tuner for a standard 6-string electric or acoustic fixed bridge guitar. Named in honor of Megadeth guitar legend Dave Mustaine, the Mechanix is a unique and innovative product which has numerous patent possibilities. Our project may not be the coolest or most unique, but it is certainly the most metal. Traditional handheld guitar tuners are passive; they tell the user whether the guitar string is in tune, sharp, or flat, but the actual adjustment of the tension in the string has to be done by the user. This requires a fair amount of dexterity from the user, particularly when fine tuning is required. Thus, to increase both the convenience and the precision of the tuning process, we designed an active, motorized guitar tuner. The Mechanix responds to the user plucking one of the strings by turning the tuning knob until the string has reached its Standard Tuning note."

This table is an electronic masterpiece in disguise. The Da Table has a large number of LEDs in a grid pattern just under the surface of the top. This allows the LED to be invisible when off but emits a nice glow when it is turned on.

UPDATE. Big thanks to Menkesdriek for sending in some pictures of the table during construction!

Finding landmines is not an easy task. This Mongoose and Robot Landmine Detector combines electronic, mechanical and animal to help make detection a bit easier. Thrishantha Nanayakkara from the University of Moratuwa.

Read more about the Mongoose and Robot Landmine Detector. (PDF)

 "To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first time a human-robot-animal integrated system is tested for antipersonnel landmine detection. The proposed system tries to integrate distinct capabilities of three different systems to improve the effectiveness of landmine detection in a cluttered environment. The mongoose is found to be a rodent with extremely sensitive olfactory capabilities, dexterous navigation capabilities in a cluttered environment, and small enough to burrow through rubble. The lightweight legged robot (4kg) can move in a minefield without detonating landmines, carry a metal detector, and interact with the mongoose and the human. The remote human operator can analyze the behaviors of the animal-robot system and judge how best the system should move from a remote location. Therefore, the system achieves a fundamental objective of humanitarian landmine detection by improving the effectiveness and accelerating the detection process through removing the human operator from the minefield. The design gave much emphasis on reducing the need to have expensive sensors and sophisticated image processing systems in order to make it as cost effective and reliable as possible. Therefore, there were only a single sonar proximity sensor and two bumper switches attached to the front of the robot. However, further improvements are needed in the arbitration mechanism that optimizes the synergy among the human, robot, and the animal by improving the learning algorithms. The robot can learn from both the animal and the human though the teaching signals can be noisy. The animal can learn from both the human and the robot to navigate with the robot attached to it. The human can learn from the animal and the robot by observing the limitations of the animal-robot system. We are conducting further research on learning algorithms that suits this scenario. Commensurate efforts have to be taken to simplify the learning algorithms to suit commercially available embedded processors and to improve the processor network to accommodate the extra processing load. Furthermore we hope to automate the training process of mongooses based on the wealth of knowledge we have gathered through manual training. This will allow the trainers to run the training sessions round the clock. "

Via: New Scientist

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Sprites Mods has done it again! Their latest hack is this Automated White Board that can take text input from the internet and plot it onto a white board for the world to see (there is a web cam looking at the board).

"The idea is that if I want the pen to be off the whiteboard, the electromagnet gets released and the spring will push a perspex rod on the whiteboard, thereby pushing the whole carriage, including the tip of the pen, away from the surface. If the pen needs to be ‘down’, the electromagnet will actuate and gravity will push the tip of the pen down to the surface of the whiteboard again. The electronics aren’t that complex: the main task is to make the stepper motors and the solenoid controllable by a PC, and in theory, not much more than a couple of driver ICs or mosfets or something like that are needed for such a task. I opted for a slightly more complex approach: the driver-ICs are controlled by a microcontroller, which accepts the amount of steps the motors need to be moved on a serial port. It then moves the steppers in such a way that they start and stop at the same time, varying the velocity accordingly. For short distances, that gives a neat straight line on the whiteboard. This way, the PC can be relieved of a bit of work. I used an FT232-board I had lying around for for the interfacing: the computer I was planning on connecting it to didn’t have a serial port to spare."

Via: Hackaday

I know, we have featured a few of these Guitar Hero robots here in the last while… But they are so interesting, this Slashbot Guitar Hero Robot by Texas A&M Electrical Engineering uses similar principals as Auto Guitar Hero did. The main difference is that Slashbot actually presses the keys as it plays. Video after the jump.

"Slashbot is especially cool because it literally plays the guitar controller using mechanical actuators.  The robot implements a National Instrument PXI box to digitize the composite video signal.  Then, using NI LabVIEW, the luminance of specific pixels are monitored to detect "notes" on the screen.  This information is then passed to the robotic actuators through a reconfigurable I/O FPGA in the NI PXI box.

Currently, Slashbot is able to average very close to 100% accuracy in Expert mode.  It is also possible for a human player to challenge the robot in multi-player mode.  So far, the robot has always been more accurate!

This system was created by four Texas A&M University undergrads: David Buckner, Mitchell Jefferis, Vinny LaPenna, and Michael Voth.  The project was developed over the past three months for their Electrical Engineering Senior Design class."

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If you skydive already and are looking for a new hobby, jetpowered flight may be just what you are looking for!

"The jet-pack consists of wings with a total three meter span with four model engines built under the wings. Speeds of up to 200 kilometers per hour are possible. So far, the device does not allow powered take-offs. So, he jumps out of a plane, stabilizes his flight, and then powers up. Up to four minutes of powered flight at speeds of one hundred knots have been achieved."

This Fiery Half Body Robot Pushes Shopping Cart is just what I need to push my groceries home from the store. I would love to film this thing walking into a Walmart past the greeter.

"An electric motor was used to drive the rear axle of the shopping cart. The same motor turned a bicycle camshaft which pulled slowly, then released quickly 2 cables. The radio control consisted of 2 channels. 1 would be a simple switch (forward/stop). The second was connected to a H-bridge constructed from 2 Double Throw Double Pole switches. The switches were made from wire and glue and a coat-hanger."

Via: Wired