Unmanned Ocean Crossing

September 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

This is the Pinta, an autonomous sailboat built to attempt an ocean crossing from Ireland to Martinique (in the Caribbean). A group of researchers at Aberystwyth University built her as part of the Microtransat Challenge.

To keep tabs on the vessel her creators included an Iridium short burst data modem with a backup system made from a SPOT satellite tracker using a PIC microcontroller to trigger a transmission every six hours. The sailing systems are a conglomeration of a Gumstix board, GPS, a windshield wiper motor to control the sail, and a tiller pilot for steering. A set of solar panels helps to top off the lead-acid batteries that power the system.

Unfortunately the old gal has encountered problems. You can see from the tracking data that, although it sailed 500 km in the last twelve days, she is still just off the coast of Ireland. The primary tracking system has failed, which could signal a system-wide computer failure. We hope the team will eventually recover the vessel as we’re interested in finding out what caused this unfortunate turn of events.

A Fantastic Collection Of Slapped Together Bots

September 23, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

[David Williamson] has put together some pretty amazing little robots from bits of stuff he laying around the house. What initially caught our attention was this drawing robot over at HackedGadgets. We were impressed by the construction, as it looks like almost all of it was scrap. Upon clicking through the link we found a small collection that kept as amused for quite a while. Each one has some aspect that is surprising in its use of mundane materials. Need an omniwheel? Why not use plastic beads. Want a rail from which a robot can hang and drive? why not use drinking straws. Many of them may not have much for a brain, but the construction of the mechanisms is usually pretty interesting alone. You can see clips of some of his creations in the video after the break.

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As Promised: More Industrial Robot Goodness

September 19, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 7 Comments

Remember [Mattythorne]? He took a BMW industrial arm and re-purposed it to write twitter messages on a white board. You can read a small excerpt here.

Well [Matt] is back, and as promised includes an entire write up for how he got @scribblebot scribbling twitter messages. It’s a little light on details and we wish there was some more in-depth how-to magic, but then we remembered with most of the population not having an industrial arm in the first place the extra time spent incorporating the extra info would be far from worth it. Regardless, it doesn’t surprise that the previous commentators were not far off the mark in how difficult programing one of these machines would be. While such arms do have a few built in libraries it looks like a very exhausting process to override the default axis of motion, incorporate a UI, build a pen holder, and more. And in the end, is it worth it? [Matt] tells us the arm is going to be going back to monotonous car building work soon, giving weeks of prep only a day in the limelight.

Robot Laser Tag

September 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Shay] and his friend built some battling robots for a school project. Instead of destroying each other’s robots with saws or torches, they are playing laser tag. Each robot sports an eeePC, a laser pointer on a movable arm, and some photoresistors. The goal is to get your laser to hit the other robot’s photoresistor to lower its health towards a kill. A server keeps track of the bout, monitoring shot fired because you won’t find unlimited ammo in this game. As for piloting the rig, the netbook webcam is streamed to a control station with an Xbox 360 controller for motion, aiming, and firing. Check it out after the break.

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Re-purpose Industrial Robotic Arms

September 7, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 53 Comments

We must find out where you can acquire these industrial robots pictured above. Sure, you expect car companies like BMW to have a few lying around, which they used to make into a Twitter message writing robot. But Bungie, a video game company, to have one as part of an advertisement for Reach?

The former is just a scratch on the surface, with some pictures, but a much more decent writeup will be provided after September 12th. The latter has a few videos, and you can watch it recreate a monument with light ‘live’. And while both are impressive uses of old tech, neither answered our first question, we gotta get us one of these.

[Thanks Matt and FurryFriend]

Snake Bot Climbs Trees

September 6, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

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.

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Spy Video TRAKR: Software And First Hack

September 2, 2010 by Phil Burgess 23 Comments

Our initial view of the Spy Video TRAKR “App BUILDR” site had us believing this would be an internet-based code editor and compiler, similar to the mbed microcontroller development tools. Delving deeper into the available resources, we’re not entirely sure that’s an accurate assessment — TRAKR may well permit or even require offline development after all. Regardless of the final plan, in the interim we have sniffed out the early documentation, libraries and standalone C compiler and have beaten it into submission for your entertainment, in order to produce our first TRAKR hack!

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