Quadruped walks of four legs, rolls on four treads

tracked-quadruped-robot

This robot doesn't know if it's a walker or a tank. It's the brain-child of [Marc Hamende] who works as a mechanical engineer by day and mad roboticist at night. The best place to find full details is by digging into the long thread he's been posting to for about six weeks. It will give you a pretty good snapshot of his approach, starting with SolidWorks renderings of the project, and adding in … [Read more...]

NSL takes their propeller driven car to the drive through

nsl-propeller-driven-land-vehicle

So what's the first thing you do after completing your propeller driven land tricycle build? Head on over to the Starbucks drive through and see what kind of response you get from the workers. That's exactly what the guys from North Street Labs did. You can see the response in the clip after the jump. Having three wheels and being moved by an electric motor with a propeller led to the name … [Read more...]

Portable gaming console uses SSD1289 and Propeller

building-a-portable-video-game

[Samir] dabbles in hobby electronics and decided to put his skills to the test by building this portable gaming console (Note: this site uses an HTTPS address which cannot be used through Google Tranlator. It does work for the Chrome browser translator). The image above is a screenshot from his Breakout-style game. The paddle at the bottom is controlled with the touchscreen. You move it back and … [Read more...]

Watermelon air boat

watermelon-air-boat

We think you'll turn a few heads in Central Park if you're driving a water melon around when everyone else is piloting sailboats. This watermelon is both sea worthy and radio controlled thanks to the work which [Starting Electronics] put into it. We used this image because it shows you what's inside of the hull, but you don't want to miss the thing motoring around an above-ground swimming pool … [Read more...]

Creating a MIDI synth from a Commodore SID

keys

The Commodore SID was the audio chip in the venerable Commodore 64 and in the 30 years since release has attained classic status and become one of the best ways to get your chiptune on. Designed by famous synthesizer designer [Bob Yannes], it was only a matter of time before we saw a real, homebrew MIDI synth based on the Commodore SID. Because real SID chips are rare as hen's teeth nowadays, … [Read more...]

Programming a Propeller on an ARM

prop

[Stefan] uses a small ARM-powered netbook for his development work, so when he tried to play around with the Parallax Propeller he ran into a few problems. The official tools from Parallax are Windows only, and the available 3rd party dev tools are only compiled for x86. After a lot of futzing about, [Stefan] was able to develop on his ARM netbook and wrote in to tell us how it's … [Read more...]

ProtoSynth, the prototyping synthesizer

prototyping-synthesizer

This project isn't really a prototype, but a tool for prototyping. [Tymkrs] came up with a unique way to build this synthesizer prototyping tool. They actually patched into the underside of the breadboards in order to keep all of the permanent bits nice and tidy. In the clip after the break you'll see all of the build photos that lead up to this point. After cutting out and assembling the … [Read more...]