Radio Controlled Sphere

February 5, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8twa_zqT9Vg&feature=player_embedded]

[prabbit22m] has written an instructable on how to build a radio controlled sphere. The mechanism is fairly simple, with one drive motor, one servo and a gyro for stability. To turn, the servo shifts the center of gravity off to one side. You can see that the system works pretty well in the video above. If it didn’t have that gyro, it would be insane, believe us, we’ve done our own experimenting. If you like this, but want more features, check out this one that has a camera and takes pictures wherever it goes. We can’t forget Swarm either. The autonomous swarm of robot spheres. Of coarse [prabbit22m] might have the best idea of all. Dress it up as a regular ball to mess with people.

Laser Pup

February 4, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

laser_pup

[Joe] sent us this project called Laser Pup. After seeing many other projects with the ioBridge like beer pouring and dog treat dispensing, he wanted to make his own. His project allows him to play with his dog via a ceiling mounted laser pointer. We know, you were hoping for something more along the lines of Laser Cats, but this is still pretty cool. He built a web interface specifically for the iPhone to control the laser, room lights, and show a live feed of the puppy playing. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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Pong Playing Robot

February 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[vimeo=1564591]

Sometimes, it can be very difficult to find a partner to play pong. Lets face it, pong just isn’t worth playing alone. Someone has come up with the perfect solution, a robot built specifically for playing pong. It watches the “ball” with a web cam and presses the appropriate buttons on the keyboard with its tentacle like arms. It is vaguely reminiscent of the switchboard operators from Men In Black, and definitely overkill for the job. You may notice there seems to be some performance issues with their game of pong. I doubt that the game itself is that taxing, but the same computer is controlling the robot as well.

The Segwii

January 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYUm3V1NSAM&eurl=http://segwii.com/]

The Segwii is a self balancing robot. Yes, another one, only this one can be controlled via WiiMote. The Segwii can function in stand alone mode, which offers only the ability to balance, or it can be tethered. When tethered via USB to the laptop, it can be remotely controlled using the WiiMote through processing. Sadly, the video above doesn’t show any WiiMote action. Lets hope they continue the work to incorporate a direct bluetooth connection to the bot.

This one seems to be pretty sturdy, though he does mention that temperature changes can throw off the internal gyroscope. This one seems to be similar to the Arduway in terms of how smoothly it keeps balance. The miniature balancing robot has them both beat for pure goofyness though.

Wireless Bootloading

January 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

[vimeo= 2976417]

Tired of having to physically connect to your microprocessor to upload new code? Just do it over a wireless connection. [Nathan] takes us through the process of setting up a wireless bootloader for the ATmega168. He is using the XBee base and remote modules for the wireless communication. While people have been doing wireless bootloading with the Arduino already, [Nathan] found that it was common for them to have timeout issues. His remedy was to make his own custom one that is much faster. He’s asking for help though. At this point it is tested and working, but he needs someone with more programming knowledge to help him make it “drop-in” compatible with the Arduino IDE.

Don’t forget to submit projects to our tip line.

Sweat Bot

January 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

sweatbot

The future is here ladies and gentlemen, robots are truly making our lives better. The grueling job of sweating into clothing has been taken over by the latest in technology: the sweat bot. With water heated fake skin, and robotic sweat glands, this machine works tirelessly to test clothing. While emulating walking or jogging, it sweats into the clothing. This helps in the design of more breathable and sweat resistant fabrics. Though we know it is just a machine, choosing to put the water hoses through its face was just plain creepy.

[via BotJunkie]

Forknife, Android G1 Controlled Robot

January 25, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

g1bot

When we first saw [Jeffrey Nelson]’s G1 based robot we immediately wondered what the transport for the controls was. The G1‘s hardware supports USB On-The-Go, but it’s not implemented in Android yet. It turns out he’s actually sending commands by using DTMF tones through the headphone adapter. The audio jack is connected to a DTMF decoder that sends signals to the bot’s Arduino. He wrote client/server code in Java to issue commands to the robot. You can find that code plus a simple schematic on his site. A video of the bot is embedded below.

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