The Trossen Robotics Blog has announced the winners of the “Crabfu challenge”. The challenge, issued by [Crabfu] was to make a robot that was full of character. It didn’t have to have a purpose or be autonomous, it just had to be full of character.
The first place winner, pictured above, won us over when he “blinked” a few moments into his video. Strange how something so simple can add so much life. Continue reading “Crabfu Challenge Winners Announced”
Over at the ArchosFans.com forums, [grond] has posted some screenshots of his cracked archos 5th generation. Using a custom bootloader, they’ve unlocked the ability to swap hard disks as well as some hidden plugins. The plugins seem to be used mainly for dev tools, like core dumps and screenshots, but this opens the door to possible future homebrewed plugins.
[via Engadget]
m8ta fun did an extensive teardown of OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA). OCZ’s computer/mind interface is actually a fairly straight forward design. An analog front-end cleans and amplifies the ‘neural’ signal with a few op-amps before feeding it to a 24 bit analog to digital converter (ADC). A USB enabled PIC microcontroller reads the 24bit parallel ADC output through a common 7400 series parallel to serial adapter IC. The device has an ICSP programing header (top right), though it’s not yet clear if the PIC can be read or written.
[Thanks, joeyo]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22yI_nk09Fc]
[Bacteria] sent us this sweet video of the Multi Platform Plug’n’Play system running his new GameBoy Advance module. He’s made an addon for his unit that allows him to play his GameBoy Advance cartridges as well as GameBoy ones. Watch the vid for the details and some views of the insides.
Maybe you saw the previous post and thought, “Well, that’s all well and good, but why is such a stylish case being used to ventilate cat feces?” Antec has heard your cries and has created a computer case with all the lovely curves of a litter box and just as much airflow. The Skeleton case has an open frame design with a 250mm fan on top. You mount the motherboard to a sliding tray. The power supply and hard drives are mounted underneath. It’s an interesting idea and easily replicated, but if cooling had been the goal, it would be a lot more enclosed. You can see the case with components installed on TweakTown.
[via acquire, thanks, xtine]
Cat poo stinks. We all know it. Those of us who have cats, though frequently amazed at the sheer magnitude of stench our cuddly friends are capable of, do little to remedy the situation. Sure, sometimes we buy the fancier kitty litter or the special food. [agraham999] decided to be a little more proactive. He built an automated exhaust system for the litter box. He wasn’t content to just rig a fan blowing to an exhaust vent either, he hooked it up to an automation system and a motion detector. The total cost for the project was $80, not including the mac mini that serves as the brains.
Be sure to read through the comments for some very in depth discussion about power usage and solar conversions.
[via Boing Boing Gadgets]
VideoLAN just released VLC media player 0.9.2. VLC is probably the best known open source media player, and supports most audio/video formats without additional codecs. Before VLC, we usually installed buggy codec packs to watch videos in Winamp or Windows Media Player. We’ve found the nightly builds to be pretty stable for the past month, but it’s nice to see the final version released.
Download Squad gushed over the new interface design, but omitted the real change — VideoLAN switched from wxWidgets to the Qt toolkit. Among many changes, Qt allows video effects to be applied without restarting the media.
One of our favorite new features is an adjustments and effects menu for quick picture, sound, and subtitle tweaks. The new version has better support for flash videos (FLV), and will stream from most online video sharing sites. See the full changelog at the VideoLAN wiki, and help out if that’s your thing.
[via Download Squad]
