The Otto DIY robot has just taken first place in the coveted role as “best robot to 3D print for your (inner) child”. It’s cute, it dances, it doesn’t cost too much, it’s completely open source, and it’s not impossible to write code for. It’s probably the most refined Bob design that we’ve seen yet. Watch it move in the video below.
Resurrecting a beloved piece of tech can be a trying process when fighting through the mild heartbreak — doubly so if the product has been discontinued. When their old Sony PRS-T1 e-book reader refused to charge after leaving it on their dashboard during a hot day, [Andrea Gangemi] decided to leverage a little techno-necromancy and hack together a fix.
[Gangemi] found the problem to be a battery failure, but there was nary a replacement to be found. An old Motorola mobile phone battery ended up fitting the purpose nicely. Cracking open the e-book reader, de-soldering the old battery and — after deciphering which pins were which — installing the new one was simply done with a fine, high temperature soldering iron tip and Kapton tape to avoid short-circuiting. But hold on — the new battery wouldn’t charge, and the reader displayed a message saying that the battery was over heating; irony, thou art cruel.
We humans walk funny. Pivoting one leg forward at the hip creates an offset that puts us off-balance sideways. We have to compensate for this with each step we take. Many robots handle this by instead taking small, calculated steps. Enter NABiRoS, the Non Anthropomorphic Bipedal Robot System (link to the video below). The ‘Non Anthropomorphic’ means that it doesn’t walk like a human, and yet the ‘Bipedal’ means it still walks on two legs. The difference is that it walks sideways.
Here’s how the folks from RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) at UCLA did it. Imagine you rotated both your legs 90 degrees such that they were facing in opposite directions. Then you rotate your upper body 90 degrees to face one of your legs. You can now move your legs to walk in the direction you’re facing and there’ll be no more tilting sideways each time you take a step. The joints are also simpler as only a single degree of freedom is needed in each of the knee and hip joints. The ankles and feet are done with a compliant, or an elastic, joint much as you see with a lot of prosthetic legs. As you can see in the video below, in addition to walking, they can do some surprisingly active things such as hopping up and down and what we can only call skipping. In fact, the result is sometimes very human.
Just a few weeks ago, we reported on a US NASA project to track the path and estimate the size of meteoroids in the sky using a distributed network of a handful of cameras. It turns out that there’s a similar French effort, and it’s even cooler: the Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network (FRIPON). (The name is cute, if the acronym is contrived: a “fripon” is a trickster in French.)
[Marcelo Maximiano’s] son had a school project. He and a team of students built “The Pyramid’s Secret“–an electronic board game using the Arduino Nano. [Marcelo] helped with the electronics, but the result is impressive and a great example of packaging an Arduino project. You can see a video of the game, below.
In addition to the processor, the game uses a WT5001M02 MP3 player (along with an audio amplifier) to produce music and voices. There’s also a rotary encoder, an LCD, a EEPROM (to hold the quiz questions and answers), and an LED driver. There’s also a bunch of LEDs, switches, and a wire maze that requires the player to navigate without bumping into the wire (think 2D Operation).
[Sadiq Mohamed] posted this great list of light bulb jokes in our post about drones changing light bulbs. This favored relic used to exist on a Compuserve SIG, but fortunately a dedicated user had saved the list.
There have been virtual worlds long before our computers could render anything but potatoes with anime faces. Bulletin boards, mailing lists, and forums dominated and then fell, for the most part, to social media. In a way even the personal home page has gone to the wayside. (remember geocities?)
The internet has gone through many phases of development. We’ve experimented with lots of concepts and when they fail or go out of style, there are ghost towns of information left untouched.
However, we remember. I still think fondly of my old shell server. Some of it is even history worthy enough to be in the books. What’s your favorite piece of internet gone by or just plain internet obscura? An old joke? A book five layers deep in a file structure somewhere. Or maybe just the 1959 definition of the word, “hack,” in the Tech Model Railroad Club’s first edition dictionary.
There is one aspect of desktop computing in which there has been surprisingly little progress over the years. The keyboard you type on today will not be significantly different to the one in front of your predecessor from the 1970s. It may weigh less, its controller may be less power-hungry, and its interface will be different, but the typing experience is substantially identical. Or at least, in theory it will be identical. In fact it might be worse than the older peripheral, because its switches are likely to be more cheaply made.
![The famous buckled springs in operation. Shaddim [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/bucklingspring-animation-300ms.gif)
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