Month: August 2009

Phasma Insectoid

August 27, 2009 by 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iYZVz8l0Nk]

When we saw the video of the Phasma insectoid robot above, we immediately thought of the iSprawl. After checking out their site, it turns out that the two are connected in some way, we’re not sure how, maybe just inspiration. The Phasma gives us a little more insight into the construction of the bot. The photos are highly detailed so you can see how the drive works, using the sliding cables to extend the “feet”. It seems quite agile in the video. The drive system, working off of a single cam seems like it would be easy to convert to steam. We would love to see that.

[via the pink tentacle]

DIY 3D Gets A Nod At SIGGRAPH

August 27, 2009 by 3 Comments

3dscan

Among the courses at this year’s SIGGRAPH (an annual technical conference and showcase of the latest in computer graphics research) was an introduction to 3D scanning that covers all the bases: mathematical foundations, two different build-your-own hardware approaches, and how to process and render the resulting datasets. The presenters have assembled all the course materials on a top-notch web site featuring slide shows, complete source code, and an extensive round-up with links to both commercial and homebrew 3D scanning gear. The simplest of these methods requires nothing more than a webcam, halogen light source, and a stick!

SIGGRAPH and 3D scanning have been highlighted many times on Hack a Day, but we’re swelling with pride now seeing an academic venue give a favorable nod to the DIY hacking community (on their links page). Okay, so Hack a Day isn’t called out by name, but just wait’ll next year!

[Thanks Fahrzin]

Interfacing A Digital Rotary Switch

August 27, 2009 by 19 Comments

digital_rotary_switch

[hw640] has put together a well written and detail packed explanation of how to interface with a digital rotary switch. These digital opto encoders have just two outputs with four possible logic levels (00, 10, 11, 01). The relative position of the switch is insignificant but the direction of rotation is what matters.

The short and dirty: Each of the switch’s 2 output pins is attached to a pin change interrupt on the microcontroller. Every time the switch moves it generates either a rising edge or a falling edge on one of the two pins; both edges cause an interrupt. By checking which pin caused the interrupt, then comparing the logic levels of the two pins after that interrupt, we can determine the direction the switch was rotated.

Although this explanation uses a PIC and code written in PicBasic Pro the concepts are discussed in the abstract and would easily be adapted to an AVR or another microcontroller of your choice.

Ubuntu Repository Crash-course

August 27, 2009 by 13 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2542951&dest=-1]

[Alan] has just posted an Ubuntu screencast that will take you through a crash course in the Ubuntu repositories. If you are new to Ubuntu this will give you a much better grasp on how software repositories are handled.

The different types of updates are discussed: Security updates fix bugs that cause a system vulnerability. Updates (generic) are for bug fixes that aren’t a security threat. Proposed updates are for testing before an update hits the ‘updates’ section. Finally, backports are updates from a newer version that have been ‘backported‘ so systems running older versions of Ubuntu can have the benefit of newer features and fixed bugs.

He also provides some tips on selecting package sources (main, universe, restricted, and multiverse), and choosing the fastest mirror to reduce download times. This screencast is just part one and we hope to see 3rd party repositories, personal package archives, and repository caching covered in future installments.

Fedora Rawhide Nightly Builds

August 27, 2009 by 12 Comments

fedora_rawhide

The devs over at the Fedora Project are hard at work on the development version: Rawhide. They’ve just setup automated nightly builds of the liveCD which can easily be downloaded and tested on a CD, DVD, USB drive, virtual machine, or separate partition.

Rawhide will be released as Fedora 12 upon completion.  With this version you have a choice of Gnome 2.28 or KDE 4.3 for your desktop.  There is also improved power management, expanded support for mobile broadband, easy bug reporting, and many more new or improved features. So roll up your sleeves, download last night’s build, and help test some open source software.

[via Download Squad]

Bliplace LED Toy

August 27, 2009 by 28 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2542286&dest=-1]

These wearable LED toys called Bliplace are freshly made and headed to Burning Man. They’re pretty much just a sound reactive toy, but [Tanjent] decided to go pretty in depth in the design. They are 1″ wide octagons with 3 super bright LEDs and a microphone. The microphone is sampled at 4400 hz by the ATTiny25v and the signal is split into high and low frequency streams. The center LED is low frequency, the sides are the high. They can run a full week on a battery. He’ll be handing out 350 of them at Burning Man, then releasing the source code, boards, and kits after that.

RepRap Wedge

August 27, 2009 by 36 Comments

reprap_wedge

Generation 2.0 of RepRap, the self replicating 3d printer, is approaching realization. Code named “Mendel”, the new design will be wedge shaped rather than a box which offers a few benefits. The overall design is smaller than the original RepRap but the printable area is larger. This means more functionality with less building material. With each new generation of this project the assembly gets easier and total parts price drops making the RepRap available to a much wider audience.

The RepRap blog has put forth some design specs, a picture of the assembled prototype, and has links for general assembly information (ZIP). We won’t see a finished version of this released for a few months but so far it looks like a big leap forward.