CES: Parrot’s AR Drone

We hadn’t been here long when we stumbled upon the Drone tent. The AR Drone is a wifi controlled quadcopter that has been making waves recently. We actually got to play with one a little bit. Well, sort of. There was too much interference inside for us to fly it manually, but we did smack it around a little … Read the rest

CES: RoBoard Robotic Hand

Today while walking around the booths, we saw a robot hand sitting out with a couple of exposed boards. This of course attracted our attention, and we thought we would share.

The hand is based on a RoBoard Vortex86DX board, which is an x86 control board. We even got the pinouts and datasheets, and we will post those later when … Read the rest

CES: USB 3.0 Behind the scenes

We know a couple of you have been asking about the tech behind the show, and we managed to spot an FPGA (in this case, the Xilinx Virtex 5) serving as the core of a demo between two SuperSpeed USB Solid State drives. It was used as both a USB 3.0 hub, as well as being used to time the … Read the rest

2-axis motion timelapse photography

[Milapse] picked up a motorized telescope base a few years ago. He’s using it to add motion to time-lapse photography. The base provides two-axis rotation controlled with a handheld keypad. Custom firmware and a bit of software allow for computer control. [Milapse] is pretty well-known in the time-lapse photography circles of the Inter-web. He’s posted a ten minute videoRead the rest

Suska open source Atari ST

Got a special place in your heart for Atari computing? Now you can quench that need using new hardware. The Suska project has achieved complete hardware emulation of the Atari ST using an FPGA. The project’s progress tracker shows implementation of the major chips at 100%. They are running EmuTOS, an Atari emulator, as the operating system because … Read the rest

CES update: We made it!

Left to right [Caleb], [James], [Devlin]. We made it! We have barely gotten our feet wet, but already got to play with some cool toys. Expect some video soon.

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Spy on your office

[Garagedeveloper] sent us his custom surveillance system, part 1, part 2, and part 3 after needing a way to find out why some cables at work were becoming unplugged (spoiler, the cleaners were messing up the wiring). At the base of the system is a web cam glued to a stepper motor. However, it gets much more in … Read the rest