Robot Cage Fighting Is Still A Thing!

April 4, 2014 by James Hobson 25 Comments

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Remember Battlebots? Turns out it is alive and well in Southern California at the National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA) Robotics League. That’s right — high school students are getting to build remote controlled weaponized robots to battle to the death inside a poly-carbonate octagon arena. Awesome.

[Bradley Hanstad] wrote to us today to inform us of the 2014 Regional Competition — happening tomorrow at 10AM (PDT). We can’t make it there ourselves, but there is a live stream for everyone to see!

The league started just this fall which currently consists of 15 area high schools, community colleges, and technical schools. The goal of the league is to spark an interest in engineering and manufacturing in young students, while at the same-time providing hands-on education on the applied side of the sciences. It’s sometimes tricky to get students engaged in engineering competitions — but as soon as you say fighting robots you will have most peoples’ attention.

To see a teaser trailer for what is to come at these competitions, stick around after the break!

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SQL Injection Fools Speed Traps And Clears Your Record

April 4, 2014 by James Hobson 112 Comments

Typical speed camera traps have built-in OCR software that is used to recognize license plates. A clever hacker decided to see if he could defeat the system by using SQL Injection…

The basic premise of this hack is that the hacker has created a simple SQL statement which will hopefully cause the database to delete any record of his license plate. Or so he (she?) hopes. Talk about getting off scot-free!

The reason this works (or could work?) is because while you would think a traffic camera is only taught to recognize the license plate characters, the developers of the third-party image recognition software simply digitize the entire thing — recognizing any and all of the characters present. While it’s certainly clever, we’re pretty sure you’ll still get pulled over and questioned — but at least it’s not as extreme as building a flashbulb array to blind traffic cameras…

What do you guys think? Did it work? This image has been floating around the net for a few years now — if anyone knows the original story let us know!

Raspberry Pi UPS Using Supercapacitors

April 3, 2014 by James Hobson 21 Comments

What happens when you want to integrate a Raspberry Pi into some kind of project that gets turned on and off with mains voltage? Do you power the Pi separately, or make a UPS for it?

[Lutz Lisseck] decided he wanted to turn his ambient-lamp (Rundbuntplasma) on and off with only the main power switch in his Hackerpsace. He could build a traditional UPS using a battery pack (it’s only 5V after all!) but decided to take it a step further. He picked up a pair of 50F supercapacitors. This way his UPS would last longer than his Pi would! The caps store just enough power that when the main supply is cut, a GPIO notices, tells the Pi, and it begins a shutdown sequence lasting about 30 seconds.

While [Lutz] is using two 2.7V supercapacitors, he mentions it would be a lot cheaper to use a step-up converter instead of putting them in series — but he had the caps on hand so decided to use both.

If you need it to last a bit longer, you could make one with rechargeable batteries…

LightByte: Animated Shutters

April 3, 2014 by James Hobson 28 Comments

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Here’s another interesting project to come out of the MIT Media Lab — it’s called LightByte, and it’s all about interacting with sunlight and shadows in a new, rather unorthodox way.

We suppose its technical name could be a massive interactive sun pixel facade, but that’s a bit too much of a mouthful. What you really want to know is how it works, and the answer is, a lot of servos. We weren’t able to find an exact number but the hardware behind LightByte includes well over 100 servos, and a matrix of Arduinos to control them. While that is quite impressive by itself, it gets better — it’s actually completely interactive; recognizing gestures, responding to text messages and emails, and you can even draw pictures with the included “wand”.

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3D Printed Splint Saves Baby’s Life

April 2, 2014 by James Hobson 31 Comments

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Here’s another heartwarming story about how 3D printers are continuing to make a real difference in the medical world. [Garrett] is just a baby whose bronchi collapse when breathing — he’s been on a ventilator for most of his life — Until now.

[Scott Hollister] is a professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, as well as being an associate professor of surgery at the University of Michigan. Between him and [Doctor Glen Green], an associate professor of Pediatric Otolaryngology, they have created a bioresorbable device that could save little [Garrett’s] life.

By taking CT scans of [Garrett’s] bronchi and trachea, they were able to create a 3D model and design a “splint” to help support the bronchi from collapsing during normal breathing. If all goes well, within 3 years, the splint will dissolve in his body and he will be able to breath normally for good. The material in question is a biopolymer called polycaprolactone, which they were actually granted emergency clearance from the FDA to use for [Garrett]. They used an EOS SLS based 3D printer.

The surgery was successful, and [Garrett] is now on the road to recovery. Stick around for a few videos showing of the printing process and surgery.

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AWD Motorcycle Drives Over Anything, Fits Into Dufflebag

April 1, 2014 by James Hobson 47 Comments

This has got to be one of the strangest motorcycles we’ve ever seen. It has huge tires, both wheels are chain driven, and it only weighs 100lbs or so — did we mention it also comes apart and fits into a dufflebag?

It’s what appears to be a home-made Russian bike of some sort, in fact, the YouTube title when translated is “ATV Suitcase” and they aren’t wrong… Anyway, it appears to be designed off of the American-made Rokon Trailbreaker, which is another AWD motorcycle with giant tires, huge ground clearance and extremely versatile — except this one Russian one is either really light, or the rider is ridiculously strong the way he throws the bike around.

In the following video the owner shows off the bike’s prowess climbing stairs, mountains, floating in water, and even uses it as a ladder to climb up a rock face — and then drags the bike up after him.

Plus he can disassemble it in a matter of minutes and fit it in a car smaller than a Fiat.

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Low-cost Solar Panels Are Easy To Make And Reconfigure

April 1, 2014 by James Hobson 18 Comments

What’s the size of a deck of playing cards and can pump out enough power to charge your cellphone? These awesome little home-made magnetic solar panels!

[Christian Pedersen] has just published a guide on how to make these handy little solar panels, and they only cost about $1.25 each! They are capable of providing between 0 – 0.5V at 400-1000mA depending on the light available and load being driven.

All you need to make them is some multicrystalline solar cells, copper tape, Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate (EVA — a film used to protect solar panels) and Polycarbonate sheet for the external hard case. You can then assemble them in a matter of minutes, and laminate for a permanently sealed panel. He’s also added thin neodymium magnets so the panels stick together when you arrange them in a line! Perhaps a future version could have the copper strips going in both directions to allow for larger arrays to be made.

He also has a complete BOM on his GitHub, and if you happen to be at the Maker Faire in San Mateo in May, he’ll be showing you how — in person!

[via Instructables]