Fresh hacks every day
Careful, this hack might foster doubts about the level of fun you're having at you own Computer Science department. Last weekend a group of students at MIT pulled off a hack of great scale by turning a building into a Tetris game board. The structure in question is the Green Building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Campus. It houses the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences … [Read more...]
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology just announced the first course offering in their new online classes program. Great news, it's an analog design course which is right up our alley. The prototype session will be 6.002: Circuits and Electronics. If you're a fan of our links posts you may remember hearing about the MITx program a month ago. After seeing the popularity of the Stanford … [Read more...]
They can put a man on the moon, but they can't put a man in LEO Yeah, we're enraged by that headline. Anyway, NASA put up a whole bunch of projects and made them open source. From the looks of it, there's plenty of cool stuff: genetic algorithm libs, toolkits for astrodynamics simulations (on the Goddard site), and this cool thing. Nyan all the disks! [brainsmoke], a hacker over at … [Read more...]
The only problem with this self-balancing unicycle is it's inability to balance itself. You see, it automatically balances along the axis that is parallel to the line of travel. But since there's only one wheel the rider is responsible for balancing perpendicular to travel. This is really not too much different from a bicycle; balancing while in motion is pretty simple. Only when you slow down … [Read more...]
Want to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in one month? Seaswarm says it can be done with 5000 floating robots. As the name implies, the project uses swarm robotics. Each unit draws power from the sun, and drags around a conveyor belt of oil absorbent nanofabric that doesn't get wet in water. Once the fabric is saturated with crude it can be removed using heat; not a task the swarm can do … [Read more...]
Researchers at MIT have come up with this slick demo of, what they call, programmable matter. This flat sheet covered in tiny foil actuators can be programmed to fold into specific shapes. Shown in the video above is a boat and an airplane. Using the concepts set down by origami through the years, they can divide the sheet into triangles in specific arrangements to make certain shapes … [Read more...]
This final project at MIT turned out quite nice. It is a CNC mill that cost under $100 to make. The tolerances are pretty tight as you can see in the pictures of the PCBs he has milled. He shows that he can even mill mild steel. It is a pretty brief writeup, but you can download build instructions and pcb files. [via HacknMod] … [Read more...]
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