Fresh hacks every day
Anyone who's traveled the grounds of a cattle ranch will tell you there's a lot of stopping to open and close gates. But this project is aimed at letting you operate the gate from the comfort of your vehicle. It uses a spool of wire as the gate, lowering it for vehicle access with the use of a remote control. The base station uses a solar panel to keep the battery topped off. But if you're not … [Read more...]
Add some fruit to your indoor bounty with this hydroponic strawberry farm. [Dino] whipped this up as his 45th hack a week episode (getting pretty close to his year-long goal). He used parts you probably already have sitting around the house somewhere. But even if you bought everything and used it once you still wouldn't be out much. A plastic storage container serves as the base. [Dino] also … [Read more...]
Prospero is the working prototype of an Autonomous Micro Planter, which is intended to be unleashed as a swarm. Using a Parallax propeller mounted on a Lynxmotion AH3-R hexapod body, though we have a ton of different ideas on hexapods if you find the price of the body to be out of budget. Inputs to the machine are pretty standard robot fare like infrared, and ultrasound. Outputs on the other … [Read more...]
The Blender Foundation has just received a new render farm. It came in the form of a four-drawer file cabinet something akin to the popular Ikea clusters. Each draw holds four motherboards, power supplies, and hard drives and the whole cabinet will eventually add up to a 16-node cluster. Join in on the geeky excitement by watching the delivery and unpacking video after the break. We love it when … [Read more...]
We've seen the Arduino board in charge of some pretty unique tasks in the past. Harvesting locally grown soybeans was not one of them. [Lance] rigged this beast up in order to automate the monotonous task of driving up and down the vast soybean fields of Iowa. The 15 ton farm combine's hydraulic steering pump is at the mercy of a team of gadgets, including a GPS, Windows 7 PC, and the … [Read more...]
If there's one thing we've got a LOT of here in America, it's corn. In the past few years Corn Mazes have become a wildly popular fall activity for all ages. We've enjoyed many ourselves and part of what we like about them is that they're a hack. Whether made by the farmer down the road or a professional company most now use GPS to ensure a fun, challenging, and cool looking corn maze. We spoke … [Read more...]
Researchers at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have been demoing a new power suit. It's intended to be used by people hand harvesting in the farm industry. The 55 pound device supports the worker's joints as they squat and reach. Within three years, they hope to have the cost within $10K. We've seen quite a few power suit devices this year, but research has been going on for many … [Read more...]
Subscribe for weekly videos
Recent comments