We noticed this article on BotJunkie about Archie the helper bot. Archie is supposed to help out around the house with cooking, cleaning, and other mundane tasks. [Evan] makes a very good point though. Why do people insist on putting creepy heads on their robots. They aren’t making them any more endearing, it’s just creepy. While that is a very astute observation, we would like to add some more. Watch the video above, and study the image after the break. Archie doesn’t seem to be a functional bot. He never moves in the video under his own power. The scene where they “walk” him along is comedy gold. His head keeps falling backwards,or possibly off. And what use is a helper bot that doesn’t have actuated hands? The video is in German, so maybe we’re missing something. Maybe Archie is a mock up or a joke and we just needed translation.
When an unsuspecting person walks up to [Rob Ray's] ATM machine, they are greeted with a surprise that doesn’t involve giving them their money. When they insert their card, the video above plays followed by a game where you control a beaver trying to save money during a recession. Surprisingly, people usually found it humorous and didn’t immediately freak out that their card was in a machine that wasn’t their ATM. His site has all kinds of pictures of various users as well as the construction of the project.
Almost exactly a year ago, we posted the random USB capslocker. [Garrett] has revisited the idea to build a smaller, neater version. He has posted the build process to give us an idea how he goes about building things. The overall build is quite nice, but part if its neatness can be attributed to the fact that he had access to an Epilog laser cutter. If you think you might be using one in the near future, this is a great writeup for you.
After declaring our independence last fall, complete site autonomy seemed like the next logical step. Using some clever coding we have developed a system that will let Hack a Day run without any intervention. The first layer in this system is topic selection. All tip line submissions are sent through a series of filters. These look for keywords like “firmware”, “POV”, “microcontroller”, “video”, “linux”, “WRT”, “GPS”, “PCB”, “TLA”. Each submission is given a l33tness ranking based on these words and the best tip is immediately thrown away. The second highest link is then passed through our advanced anti-duping engine that confirms the link hasn’t been posted in the last week. The post text is generated using Markov chains in what top scientists suspect is a miracle. The story is then automatically cut and pasted into Digg without credit. To foster discussion the reader comments are automatically seeded with “first post” and “this is not a hack” on every post. This system is implemented using a large quantity of duct tape (code and literal) on our brand new Linksys WRT54G beowulf cluster. We hope this system serves you well. We’ve been working on an “auto-hacking robot” to generate how-tos as well, but on its test run it instinctively disassembled itself.
