While you are out enjoying your Labor Day festivities, keep an eye out for robot snakes in the trees. The CMU robotics lab has built a snake bot named Uncle Sam that can climb trees and poles. As you can see in the video after the break, the bot seems to have no problem at all scaling a tree. It wraps itself around the tree, then rotates down the center of its entire body. Once it has reached the top, it can take in the scenery. Though it is a little creepy looking, at least it isn’t in the water.
Author: Caleb Kraft1567 Articles
Solid Ice Beer Caddy
[Rob] has made an astounding contribution in the effort to keep our libations chilled. Not content with merely refrigerating his cold ones, or even putting them in a cooler full of ice, he has built a beer caddy out of solid ice. Though it may look simple initially, you can see from his writeup that it actually took quite a few itterations to get it to freeze correctly, and then actually survive the process of removing the bottle placeholders. Ultimately, he found that glass bottles full of sand work best and you have to freeze the caddy in layers. Though he calls himself an impatient person, we’ve seen people who insisted on having their cold ones made frigid faster. You can see a video of the ice caddy after the break.
Binary Calculator
[Syst3mX] emailed us about his Binary Calculator earlier this week and it almost slipped into the depths of our inbox. Luckily We noticed it in there today and thought we’d share.
He wanted to be able to calculate binary values without having to jump through hoops or boot up his computer, so he built his own binary calculator. For the brains, he chose an ATTiny2313. He can do basic operations like NOT, AND, OR, XOR, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modulo. It isn’t too bad looking either. You can catch a video of it in action after the break.
The Spindicator
[Harvey] wrote in to share the Spindicator with us. The spindicator is a hard drive activity activity indicator built in a ring to resemble a dekatron. Using the pulses from the hard drive activity LED, [Harvey] tested several different methods of interpreting that data for display. The final version, negative edge triggered with a lowpass filter can be seen after the break. It is nice and smooth and vaguely reminiscent of many programs’ loading screens.
He has pictures and tons of detail on the project including videos of previous versions that acted quite erratically.
EEVblog Dissects A Kindle 3
[Dave] over at the EEVblog did a review of the kindle 3 recently, but never got to the good stuff, the guts. He is now rectifying this with a full video dissection of the eReader. Full of details on how to open it up as well as specifics on the internals, this is a fun video to watch. One thing that caught our attention was the RFID tag on the inside of the case. It is probably for inventory tracking, but we can’t help but have a few tinfoil hat type thoughts. You can watch the video after the break.
Controlling The Power Of A Flash With A Tv Remote
For those who do fancy photography, setting up the lighting ends up being one of the larger tasks of each session. There are flashes out there that can be controlled via a remote control to help ease the process, but they can cost a considerable amount more. [Dsvilko] shares with us a fairly simple circuit that allows you to use a tv remote to control your flash. He’s using a picaxe 08m and he states that before this project, he had never messed with microcontrollers. We say great job on your first microcontroller project. You can catch a video of it in action after the break.
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Trossen Robotics Holding Another Contest
You have until December 1st to get your entry into the Trossen DIY robotics contest. Unlike the last Trossen contest we told you about, this one has no clear theme. The goal is simply to make an awesome robot. Registration is free, and entries will be judged on Ingenuity, Originality, and presentation/documentation. There are prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places, with the 1st place prize being the Interbotix Hexapod. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is a kit of a hexapod that is pretty quick on its feet. You can catch a video of it after the break.