[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI06lujiD7E]
We’ve seen several different balancing bot styles over the past few years, but this one is new to us. The BallP, short for Ball inverted Pendulum, balances on top of a ball. We’re not sure what the advantages are to this layout though. Anyone care to enlighten us? Even though we hadn’t seen this style, it is apparently not new. The Ballbot has been around for a while and might seem even more impressive visually.
At roughly $20 to build, this 9 digit pulse counter is an excellent example of home built tools. The builder, [Josh] found himself repairing a device and in need of a pulse counter. With the components cheaply available, he just built his own. He says that it has a few limitations, like display brightness, but overall it seems to do the job well. You can download the PCB from his site.
[via MakeZine]
The NY based hacker group named Ithacka has posted an interesting challenge. Buy a box of junk and build something with it following their guidelines. Document it and submit it for voting. There are some rules that allow you to use a few pieces that don’t come from the box, but the list is short. They don’t specify what the prize is, but entries must be submitted by August 1st.
[bunnie] has taken a few moments to show us how to turn our Chumby One into a 3g router. As it turns out, there is an easter egg that allows it to communicate with certain models of 3g dongles. There’s no GUI for this trick, so you’ll be doing most of your configuration via SSH. That shouldn’t be a problem for this crowd though. The Chumby One just got a lot more appealing.
While browsing through flicker this morning, we spotted this interesting image. Two radio controlled cars hooked to Arduinos. What was going on? What is [knolleary] doing with them? We couldn’t find any information so we clicked through to his personal site. What we found was a quite interesting story about how he set up a race between two taxi cabs being controlled by the Emotiv headsets for the BBC. Yeah, forget driving a Rovio around with your mind. We’re still a bit curious about the two bumper cars in the picture. We can see that his tests were done on a blue radio controlled mini, so what are the bumper cars for? Did any of you catch this on the air? How well did the taxis drive? Was he using the facial expressions or the concentration?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNkkuMO5l7A]
[Robert] at Extremetech was going to write a review of the Emotiv EEG headset but found the bundled software lacking. He decided to write something to really show off what could be done with an EEG in your home. He is now controlling his Rovio with his mind. He had already written a new control program for the Rovio, so redoing the same program with the EEG controls would give him a great comparison. If you recall from the mind controlled TV, meditating on a single thought can be cumbersome for quick controls. Instead, he used facial expression recognition. Maybe this should be called “face controlled Rovio” instead.
This isn’t a specific project, so much as a pointer to a budding new site. Puppet Circuits is the project of [Raphael Abrams], one of the co founders of NYC Resistor. As you can probably guess, he has been posting about the circuits he uses in his animatronic puppets. I faces all kinds of problems since may of the systems are to be worn and have to endure some pretty rough treatment and still perform well. Very interesting stuff to read about.
