Roboexotica 2008

robo11

We couldn’t make Roboexotica in Vienna, Austria this year (check out last year’s coverage), so we asked [Bre Pettis] to act as our liaison.

Last night was the opening party of Roboexotica, the worldwide gathering of cocktail robots. It was a blast! Pictured above is Robovox, a 40 foot high robot that you can text message … Read the rest

Controller button marquee

controller_marque

[Ben Heck] posted an interesting one-off project he built many months ago. Video game developer Infinity Ward approached him to build a large display that indicated what buttons on a controller were being pressed. They were planning on using it during player testing by recording the board and the monitor at the same time. They could then compare the … Read the rest

iPhone controlled dog treat dispenser

[Stephen Myers] has been toying around with some beta ioBridge hardware. He decided to build a remote control dog treat dispenser. ioBridge‘s hardware is built specifically to make web enabling projects easy. The main controller board has four I/O channels that speak to addon modules. It has an ethernet port on the main board and an easy to … Read the rest

Robot Strippers not too enticing

robot_strippers

We really aren’t sure what the statement is here.  This is one of the displays at the MuTate London Exhibition. There is tons of stuff to see there, from interactive displays to giant art-piece vehicles. This specific display seems to have garnered the most attention though. we can understand the megaphone headed flailing DJ, but what is with the … Read the rest

Musical shirt from toy keyboard

musical_shirt

[mikamika] has put together a great tutorial on how to build this musical shirt. The whole process is covered, from taking apart the toy keyboard to laying out the circuit and creating the fabric switches.  He used the same method as [plusea] for the fabric buttons and conductive thread for most of the connections. It seems as though he … Read the rest

Working with relays

relay

SparkFun’s latest tutorial shows you how to work with relays. A relay is an electrically operated switch. In this case, they’re using it to switch a 120V AC outlet. The article carries the standard warnings about how not to kill yourself with AC (plus some non sequitor linking throughout). As an extra precaution, they chose a GFI outlet. You … Read the rest

Ripsaw MS1

ripsaw

The Ripsaw MS1 is an unmanned ground vehicle built by two brothers in Maine. The tracked vehicle can go 0-60 in 3.5 seconds with an 80mph top speed. In its current form, it has a 2000 pound capacity, which opens the possibility for many different types of weapon systems. Control is provided by two people: one driver and one gunner. … Read the rest