Those of you who have played with a Pleo know exactly where this is going. The Pleo averages about 30 minues per 2-3 hour charge. Just swap batteries you say? Nope, the battery packs aren’t available. Fortunately, you can make your own pretty easily. The basic frame is a standard battery pack for 6 AA’s. There are only a few modifications necessary to line up the leads and make it fit once you’ve loaded it with batteries.
We all want our very own personal bagpiper. Playing it ourselves is too much effort, and keeping a full time bagpiper around can be a pain. You have to feed them, clothe them, give them union breaks, etc. Luckily, modern technology has come to the rescue again. You can have your very own robot bagpiper. McBlare plays the bagpipe with technical proficiency that would be impossible for most humans. But lets hear it put some soul into it.
[via BotJunkie]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n8LNxGbZbs]
[Scott] runs gamesbyemail.com. One of his biggest hurdles was producing real random numbers for the games. He had tried various methods like math.random and random.org, but kept getting complaints about the quality of the random numbers. His solution was to build an automatic dice roller. His initial attempts were made from Legos and were never quite reliable enough to be put into the system. The Dice-O-Matic however has proven to be a random number generating monster. It is 7 feet tall and capable of 1.3 million dice rolls per day. Wow.
[thanks Troy]
[blip.tv ?posts_id=2133808&dest=-1]
After making a few units for the new Discovery t.v. show called Weaponizers, [Jeremy] decided to release this video showing how to modify a golf cart for radio control. The radio and controller are basic off the shelf R/C gear, running some linear actuators.
[thanks Divide]
At Berkeley, they’re coming up with new ways to make their itty bitty hexapods. These are basically tiny flatpacked bodies cut from cardboard. The end goal is to not only make them smaller and faster to build, but to reduce the friction in the joints. You can download the files on their site as well as download movies of them in action. For a larger and somewhat less complicated flatpacked robot, check out the flatpacked 2 motor walker.
[thanks Thuli]
[Daniel] sent in this project. He tells us it’s an Arduino powered kid’s toy that “furiously swings his arms” when you squeeze his chest. As you can see in the video on the site, furious is up for interpretation. It is a sloth though, maybe that’s sloth furious. While it is cute and we do applaud the effort, anyone with children will agree that this is a step down in destruction for a 3 year old. You’re going to have to spice it up a bit, or give it a timer and make it free standing, make it roar or something to make it more appealing. What recommendations do you guys have to improve this toy?
Lara, the robot pictured above, is the first humanoid robot to pass security and have her own seat on a plane. The reason she had to travel via airline was that FedEx had lost and damaged her on previous trips. On the way back from Robofest, which she placed 5th in, security didn’t really want to let her on the plane. They’re lucky they didn’t all get detained. Fortunately, Robofest made the news and one guard had seen it. They call Lara autonomous, but state that she can only move her limbs based on commands. Their reason for calling her autonomous is that she doesn’t need to be tethered to a computer to do this. Does that really qualify as autonomy?
