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.”

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.”

This Spray-on Antenna could revolutionize RF transmissions if their claims are true! Apparently nano capacitors are sprayed onto almost any surface to make it a powerful antenna.

Via: PHYSORG

 ”The company is promoting it as a multi-purpose antenna, simple and quick to assemble, mountable on almost any surface, for use in any environment. “Any” bears quite a range of possible end uses.”

Larry sent in his DIY Vacuum Motion Sensor Mouse Trap creation.

“I built a mouse trap using an infrared motion sensor wall switch, an extension cord, a paper towel tube and a mini shop-vac. peanut butter is the bait. The mouse goes in the tube. The sensor senses it and turns on the shop-vac for 3 seconds. And voom, the mouse is inside the shop-vac. The sensor turns off the shop-vac. And it’s ready to catch the next mouse. No re-setting. No mess. No kidding.”

This POV Hard Drive Clock with Etched Copper Numbers is a work of art. The custom board on the back keeps track of time, spins the motor and uses LEDs to light the correct number when it is in the proper location. The numbers have been etched out of a copper PCB to keep with the DIY theme!

Thanks for the tip Bruce.

“The MCU is an Atmega328 set up with Arduino bootloader. The code is all Arduino stuff. The Arduino drives the LEDs through a ULN2803 transistor array, since these LEDs are powered in groups of 3 and draw something like 30mA each, which would be too much to drive directly from the Arduino digital output pins.”

Thanks to Michael Chen for sending in his DIY Tesla Coil Build. His DIY Tesla Coil Instructable takes you through all of the steps he took to build it. He is still working out some bugs in his electronics since he is able to fry some components if he isn’t careful but it does seem to work great when it is working. Only take on a Tesla Coil project is you know how to safely work with high voltage since it can seriously hurt you if you are not careful.

You can also vote for this project on Instructables if you think it is good enough to be a winner, see the vote button on the top right of the page.

“A Solid State Tesla coil is made by four main parts: the primary coil, the secondary coil, the topload, and the control circuitry.

The Secondary : The secondary is the long, orange cylinder. It is actually a white PVC pipe covered by a lot of enameled wire. One side is connected to ground, high voltage comes through the other side.

The Primary : The primary is powered by the control circuitry and it generates the magnetic field that the secondary uses to create the high voltage. It is the few turns of thick wire at the base of the secondary coil.

The Topload : The topload is the metallic object at the top of the secondary coil.  It provides a capacitance to the Tesla coil.

The Control Circuitry : The circuits that make the tesla coil work at the correct frequency and duty cycle; based on Steve Ward’s design. “

If you have a project that needs a bit more than 3.3, 5 or 12 volts have a look at this Home Made 250 kV High Voltage DC Power Supply! Of course this isn’t your typical supply for the Arduino project sitting on the corner of your bench. One thing to note is that this supply can pack a deadly punch so be very careful if you intend to do some tinkering on your own.

“The Cockroft-Walton multiplier uses a cascaded series of diodes and capacitors to generate a high voltage DC potential from an AC input through a circuit topology that uses diodes to charge capacitors in parallel and discharge them in series.  The output polarity of the Cockroft-Walton multiplier depends on the way in which its diodes are oriented, so the output polarity (referenced to ground) of a high-voltage DC power supply is usually set during the design.”