Day: July 27, 2017

Telepresence Robot 2000 Leagues Under The Sea

July 27, 2017 by 10 Comments

Telepresence robots are now a reality, you can wheel around the office and talk to people, join a meeting, see stuff and bump into your colleagues. But imagine if telepresence were applied to deep sea exploration. Today we can become oceanographers through the telepresence system created by Bob Ballard (known for locating the Titanic, discovered deep sea geothermal vents, and more) and his team at the Inner Space Center. Put on your Submariner wristwatch because its time for all of us to explore the ocean depths via the comfort of our home or office.

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Play With A Papercraft Electronics Activity Book

July 27, 2017 by 7 Comments

As conductive ink becomes readily available and in greater varieties, we’re starting to see some intriguing applications. [Marion Pinaffo] and [Raphaël Pluviange] created a book of papercraft projects that employ silver-based ink for making a circuit’s wires, carbon-based ink for resistance, as well as color-changing ink. Electronics components’ leads are slipped into slits cut into the paper, connected to conductive-ink traces.

[Marion] and [Raphaël] use 555s, ATtiny85s, watch batteries, and other hardware to make each activity or project unique. A number of projects use a rolling ball bearing to make beeps in a piezo speaker. They also created beautifully designed pages to go with the electronics.

It looks like a fun way for neophytes to play around with electronics, and once the paper part is kaput, the user would be left with the hardware. Imagine one of those beginners googling to find the pinout of the Tiny85 or discovering the Stepped Tone Generator and makes one with the 555.

If you like this project you’ll appreciate the working papercraft organ and papercraft resistor calculator we previously published.

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PobDuino Makes The Most Of Grove

July 27, 2017 by 1 Comment

The chassis of a toy robot serves as the base of a robot built by [Jean Noel]. Called #PobDuino, the robot features two Arduino-compatible boards under the hood.

First, a Seeeduino Lotus, a Arduino board peppered with a dozen Grove-compatible sockets. The board, which is the size of an UNO, is mounted so that the plugs project out of the front of the robot, allowing ad-hoc experimentation with the various Grove System modules. Meanwhile, a custom ATmega328 board (the PobDuino) interprets Flowcode instructions and sends commands to the various parts of the robot: servos are controlled by an Adafruit servo driver board and the DC motors are driven by a Grove I2C motor driver.

We love how easy it is to customize the robot, with both the Lotus and the Adafruit 16-channel servo driver on the exterior of the robot. Just plug and play!

Learn more about Grove-compatible plugs and a lot more in [Elliot]’s My Life in the Connector Zoo.