Keepon, Eat Your Heart Out

October 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJmyf4vg2hg]

[Ruyck] sent us this video of his mini Keepon robot. For those who haven’t been initiated, Keepon is a very emotive, and extremely expensive, dancing robot. He is deceptively simple looking, but as you can see in [Ruyck]’s version, it is fairly complex. [Ruyck] has used a mini RC collective pitch helicopter assembly for the motion, which makes controlling it fairly intuitive. At first, we were not too impressed with [Ruyck]’s final implementation, which you can see along with a comparison video of Keepon after the break. Then we realized, all he as to do is find a way to attach the bottom of the foam body to the base to achieve much more of the squash and stretch motion of keepon. A little creative programming and this little fellow could be made autonomous and synchronized to music.
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Mr. Wake, Wakes Up And Runs

October 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdeqd-e0mjI]

[isotope] must really hate himself. He has built a torture device of pure evil. Mr. Wake, his alarm clock robot, should be considered a torture device. This cute looking little bot, with its bright and colorful clock and neat plastic tube frame is an alarm clock. As soon as it’s alarm goes off, Mr. Wake starts watching for you. If it detects your presence, it takes off, only to wait for you to stumble, bleary eyed, to its current location. Do you know what it does when you catch up to it? It takes off again. Why would you build a robot that you know you are just going to destroy in a groggy fit of animalistic rage?

We actually like Mr. Wake more than clocky, simply for its hackish feel. If you really really have problems getting up, you may want to consider something a little more drastic.

[via Makezine]

BigDog’s Bipedal Brother

October 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67CUudkjEG4]

Boston Dynamics is at it again. This time, they’ve created a creepy biped with a natural gait. It may look very similar to BigDog, because it really is almost the same system. Named PETMAN, this biped system is being designed to help test chemical protection suits. This bot can stress the suit by walking, running, and even crawling in a room filled with poison gas. Not only can PETMAN walk, run, and crawl, but it can also sweat and change its temperature. That’s pretty cool. Like BigDog, the most impressive part is when they give it a shove and it recovers with a motion that seems almost organic.

Halloween Props: Servo Eyes

October 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[flickr video =http://www.flickr.com/photos/todbot/3991211183/]

If you’re wanting to spice up a Jack-o-lantern, why not give it some spooky eyes that will look around? [todbot] shows us how to set this up using an Arduino and 3 servos. His rig uses a hobby servo to control the entire head’s orientation and a smaller servo for each eye’s movement. Their motion is random, but quite convincing. He has them all stuck together with popsicle sticks, but you would probably move the location of the large servo to rotate the entire pumpkin, or whatever other prop you put it all in. You can download the Arduino sketch and give it a try your self. We might suggest building a simple rack and pinion rig to rotate both eyeballs with a single servo.

[via HackedGadgets]

Halloween Props: Alien Costume

October 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

alien

[creatrope] sent in this slick Alien costume that he made for his son. The costume does look decent, but not professional. For something tossed together from parts around the house, it looks fantastic. The real kicker, is the fact that it has the retractable inner mouth. The retractable mechanism is constructed from Legos and extends when his son opens the mouth. We think he did a fantastic job with this costume, but if you’re looking for something a little more polished, check out this Alien made by [Asy0uw1sh ] you can see a little more detail on how it works here.

Vodaphone Ringtone Music Commercial

October 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3nSoEhY8SM]

When we first saw Vodaphone’s ringtone commercial where 1000 cell phones perform a section of the William Tell overture, we just assumed it was some slick video editing, not to be taken seriously. Apparently, we were wrong. They actually did this. They actually sent text messages to all the phones in correct timing to play the music. In the video after the break, you can see some details on how they pulled it off. They had to perform this during non peak usage hours to ensure that all their texts went through. We think this project is pretty impressive. Actually, we still don’t know how they pulled it off, we can’t seem to predict how long a text message will take to reach its destination with any kind of reproducible accuracy.

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Halloween Prop: Glowing Spooky Eyes

October 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

spooky_halloween_eyes_pic_microcontroller (Custom)

Would you like some spooky glowing eyes that light up and play a sound when someone gets near? This circuit makes it pretty simple. It uses a single phototransistor to detect someones presence. Instead of having a preset threshold that needs to be met, it simply triggers any time there is a sufficient change in the amount of light it detects. If you put one of these in a nice dark spot, your halloweeners will only see the LEDs and perceive them as eyes. It might also be cool to somehow add motion to this.

We’re running out of time to prepare for Halloween, don’t forget to send in your projects.

[via HackedGadgets]