[Don] had some Serial RFID readers that he needed to work and be powered by USB. He went out and purchased a simple serial to USB converter, but was left with the problem of the operating voltage. He supplies the schematics on his site for his solution. Basically he gutted the converter and integrated it all with the appropriate voltage broken out. The final project is nice, using the serial to USB convert as the project box and even including a nice LED to show when an RFID tag has been read.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdHY26E2jc]
Ishikawa Komuro Laboratories are doing some amazing stuff with robots right now. The video above starts out looking like a clumsy and somewhat failed attempt at dribbling a ping pong ball. Once it goes into slow motion however, we see the true action. This robot is dribbling that ball amazingly. Utilizing 1000 FPS cameras, it readjusts and hits the ball on every bounce. As the ball drifts out of the reach of the bot, suddenly we are struck with the lifelike motion. Personification can be a fleeting thing, appearing so strongly as the little bot tries in vain to reach for that ball, then disappearing again an instant later. If you really want to see some personification worthy of the crab fu challenge, check out their tool manipulation by a multi fingered hand video.
[via BotJunkie]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te9X4VRj8dU]
This interesting little sculpture caught our eye. Called the Perpetual Ball Roller, it simply rolls a ball on a track. It has both manual and automatic modes with variations in the automatic mode to keep it amusing. This is very elegant, and would be fun to have sitting around to play with. The only problem is the noise. The servo that he is using is quite loud. What could he do to make it function silently?
[via Instructables]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xb6KRD8Aso]
[Bacteria] tipped us off to his latest portable system mod called IntoGrafix. The TurboGrafix-16 was awesome when it was released. the graphics were, compared to Nintendo, astonishing. Its games were these little cards, like a thick credit card. [Bacteria] wanted to revive his old one in a more portable fashion. He designed a custom case to fit the whole thing into, which is pretty impressive itself. The screen is the trusty old PSone screen. The last time we saw a TurboGrafix, it was in a mini Arcade cabinet.
[Al] sent us over to his Rotary DECT phone project, and we think its pretty cool. He’s attending Hacking At Random, and as usual, there will be a DECT network there. Rather than having a normal DECT handset like everyone else, [Al] wanted something a little homier. He chose to combine the guts of the DECT handset into an old rotary phone. He had to use an Arduino to convert the rotary output to someting the DECT handset could use. There’s plenty more information as well as some source code on the project page.
[Bhautik] is on version 2 of his tilt-shift lens, and wrote in to share what he has learned. Some aspects of the design on version 1 made it a bit quirky to use. You had to hold the lens in place, manually adjusting the focus. This meant that no two shots were the same. Since [Bhautik] wanted to do time lapse with it, he needed to re design it. He kept it simple and cheap, around $22 total. Version two takes a lot longer to setup for the shot, but the result is reproducible. This means he can make his tilt-shift time lapse videos.
[vimeo= http://vimeo.com/5765795]
[Kyle McDonald] had a Visioneer XP 100 portable scanner laying around, so he started trying to come up with alternative uses for it. In the video above, we can see a multitouch setup rigged together using Openframeworks in Ubuntu. As you can see in the video, there’s some considerable lag. That is due to the 250-500 ms of buffering built into the scanner. It does have nice resolution; 10k pixels wide at 60 fps, so it has to be useful for something (aside from scanning). Anyone got any ideas? He says if the field of view was wider, he’d use it on a river bed to watch fish.
