Day: August 3, 2011

Come See What’s Cooking In The Arduino Kitchen

August 3, 2011 by 6 Comments

arduino_labs

The crew that brought you the Arduino is always hard at work trying to bring the community closer together and to foster collaborative development. They recently rolled out a new feature on their site that is sure to be of interest to Arduino veterans and neophytes alike.

Arduino Labs is a platform which the team plans on using as an incubator of sorts, for projects that are underway, but not fully baked. Currently, they have highlighted two in-progress initiatives, including the Arduino Mega ADK, as well as a GSM/GPRS shield that the team has been developing in collaboration with Telefonica I+D.

As of right now, the site looks to be a one-way information outlet for the Arduino team to the community, but they stress that their aim is to create a more open development process within the Arduino project. While there is no official statement on the matter, we hope that the site will eventually allow members of the community to offer both their feedback and lend manpower to forthcoming projects.

[via Adafruit blog]

A 3D Printed Aerial Drone

August 3, 2011 by 21 Comments

Drones come in many shapes and sizes, but now they can also be 3d printed! To make these drones, the [Decode] group used a selective laser sintering process which is pretty interesting in itself. Once the printing process is done, these little planes are built with only five structural and aerodynamic components. Because of their simplicity, these drones can reportedly be assembled and ready to fly with no tools in only ten minutes!

This design was done by the [Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council] at the University of Southampton in the UK by a group of students. Besides this particular plane, they concentrate their efforts on building autonomous drones under 20 Kilograms. Using a 3D sintering process with this design allowed them to make this plane how they wanted, regardless of the ease of machining the parts.

This group has several videos of their planes on their website to download, but check after the break for an embedded video of the [Newscientist] piece about their project. Continue reading “A 3D Printed Aerial Drone” →

Model Rocketry From The Rocket’s Point Of View

August 3, 2011 by 30 Comments

model_rocketry_video

When someone writes in and says, “Hey, I strapped a camera to a rocket and took videos of it launching!” it’s really hard for us to not get suckered in. Try as we might, we just couldn’t resist taking a look at the videos [Vlad] recorded of his model rocketry “exploration”.

Inspired by our 4th of July post featuring POV videos of bottle rocket launches, he bought himself an 808 keychain camera and decided to try his hand at some high flying video. He strapped the camera to his 46” Estes rocket with a few pieces of scotch tape in an effort to keep weight down, and set off to his launch pad.

He used a Estes C6-5 engine for each launch, which he estimates took the rocket up to a height of 300 feet rather than the typical 500 feet, due to the added weight. While not particularly useful, the video is still awfully fun to watch, and perhaps it will inspire others to mount cameras on even larger, more powerful rockets.

We can only hope.

Continue reading to check out the videos [Vlad] shot, but be warned, the descent is vertigo-inducing.

Continue reading “Model Rocketry From The Rocket’s Point Of View” →