Year: 2009

Airline Antics With Lara The Robot

May 14, 2009 by 37 Comments

lara

Lara, the robot pictured above, is the first humanoid robot to pass security and have her own seat on a plane. The reason she had to travel via airline was that FedEx had lost and damaged her on previous trips. On the way back from Robofest, which she placed 5th in, security didn’t really want to let her on the plane. They’re lucky they didn’t all get detained. Fortunately, Robofest made the news and one guard had seen it. They call Lara autonomous, but state that she can only move her limbs based on commands. Their reason for calling her autonomous is that she doesn’t need to be tethered to a computer to do this. Does that really qualify as autonomy?

Massive Etch A Sketch From TV Screen

May 13, 2009 by 32 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu3zojL5Y4]

[Jeri] put together an absolutely massive Etch A Sketch for The FatMan and Circuit Girl show. She had removed the DLP chip from an HD rear projection TV and decided to repurpose the 52inch screen. The movement mechanism uses pulleys from screen doors with nylon lines. The two sets of lines are fed in a criss cross pattern so that the parallel lines move in the same direction. The lines move tent poles in the x and y which controls the movements of the golf tee stylus. It’s driven by two high torque motors from $9 Harbor Freight 18V drills. They tried several different powders, but ended up using aluminum powder from an original Etch A Sketch because it sticks to everything. It will eventually be hooked up for IRC bot control once they get a large enough h-bridge.

[via adafruit]

Antique Phone Doorbell

May 13, 2009 by 30 Comments

doorbell

[Bryan] sent in this cool doorbell he made out of an antique phone. After seeing similar phones for $150 to $399, he picked one up on ebay for $10. After some cleaning and polishing, it was looking fantastic, but fairly useless. At this point, he broke it open and started hacking to turn it into a wireless doorbell. He picked up a cheap wireless doorbell and proceeded to gut it. The transmitter side got an aesthetic overhaul, a big fancy button and nice LED in a 50’s style  were added. The receiver side got hacked up as well. It was incapable of pushing the required voltage to ring the phone’s bell, so he had to do some searching for a better circuit. Since his knowledge of electronics was limited, he was looking for something that could be plugged in and work without much modification. Eventually, he found the Silvercom AG1170-s5. At $7, he swiped it up quick. It may be a bit of overkill, but he’s using an arduino to trigger the whole thing when it receives the signal. You can download the Arduino sketch on the site.

Twittjr

May 13, 2009 by 26 Comments

twittjr

Got an IBM PCjr laying around? Why not turn it into a twitter browsing machine? [Alex Grant] did this for the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Creativity and Innovation festival. You can enter search terms into the Twittjr and it will display the top 3 results from twitter. Leave it alone for a minute and it will refresh on its own. To make this happen, the Twittjr is connecting to another computer that is utilizing the twitter API to make the searches. The results are then pushed back to the Twittjr for display. All of this is done via the original modem. While [Alex] takes a moment to explain what twitter is, we feel it might be better to explain what a modem is. You see, back when the PCjr was new, we really did communicate via an analog signal over the phone lines at roughly 300 baud.

[thanks Chris]

D-Link Adds Captcha To Routers

May 12, 2009 by 30 Comments

D-Link is adding captcha support to its line of home routers. While default password lists have been abundant for many years, it was only recently that we started seeing the them implemented in malware. Last year, zlob variants started logging into routers and changing their DNS settings. It’s an interesting situation since the people who need the captcha feature are the ones who will never see it, since they won’t log in to change the default password.

[photo: fbz]

OBD-II Automotive Data Logging

May 12, 2009 by 26 Comments

obd2

[Avi Aisenberg] sent us his final project for ece 4760.  His team built and OBD-II data interface. Even though OBD-II is an industry standard, each manufacturer has implemented it differently. This is where this project shines. They have built it to be capable of talking to any of them. Not only that, but it has a nice backlit LCD screen for diagnosing issues without having to go back to your computer and downloading the data. If you really don’t need all the bells and whistles, you can make one for roughly $15. They even have an OBD-II app for the iPhone.

Irregular Incurve Robotic Instrument

May 12, 2009 by 13 Comments

irregular_incurve

The Irregular Incurve is a robotic instrument built by [Xiaoyang Feng] as part of his ITP thesis work. It’s a MIDI instrument with an array of 12 strung bows mounted to a curved shower rod. The end of each bow has a tuning key. The strings are each picked using independently mounted arms. One servo controls the downward motion of the pick while the other controls the rotation of the shaft. A damper is also attached to each arm. The string vibrations are transferred to a spruce soundbox under the bridge. Below you can see a video of Gizmodo playing with it at the ITP show. Check out [Xiaoyang]’s Flickr set for images of the build process plus some early videos of the mechanism.

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