We’re really sorry to have missed GLOW. It was a unique all-night art and music event that took place the evening of July 19, 2008, in Santa Monica, and lasted until dawn. We were most intrigued by [Shih Chieh Huang]’s haunting robotic sculptures. They were eerily beautiful, and appeared to be alive and “breathing”. He took some unusual materials – plastic bags and bottles, computer fans and circuit boards, among others, and combined them all to give the creatures otherworldly auras. Simultaneously familiar and strange, the sculptures are designed to evoke marine life, yet they’re completely different, in both materials and structure. More coverage and pictures of the event can be found at LAist, NOTCOT, and on Flickr.
Robots Hacks2445 Articles
Ice Carving Robot
[Bruce] and [Jesse] put together an ice carving robot a while back. For the most part, it’s a CNC machine that is placed on top of the ice. In order to handle the actual ice cutting, they opted for a weed eater turned super rotary tool.
Modifying A Servo For Continuous Rotation
[robomaniac] shows us how to modify a standard servo to allow continuous rotation. This is a classic robotics hack and has been around for a while, but we really like the way he put this together. Although you may need some soldering and desoldering tools to open the servo up, the hack is a physical one. All you really need to do is cut off a plastic tab on one of the gears. If you want to see an example of a bot you can build with one of these CR servos, he just posted this one motor walker.
BiPed Robot Version 3
Instructables user [alex.v] posted version 3 of his BiPed Robot. This robot is designed to mimic the control and movements of a human’s lower body. It has 12 degrees of freedom and a nice custom framework CNC’d from acryl sheets. The electronics consist of servos controlled by a custom board built around an ATmega8 and 3 ATtiny26s all programmed in assembly. He also has custom desktop software written in VB which allows direct control of the robot and graphs sensor data. His site contains pictures, videos, and design materials.
7 Really Creepy Robots
Creepiness is a hard feeling to objectively evaluate, but we dare you to not get creeped out by these realistic robots listed by Cracked.com. It’s the uncanny valley of robots that are almost, but not completely lifelike, and which repulse most humans. It begs the question: how could you resolve the uncanny valley problem? Would you build a robot to look exactly like you, as [Hiroshi Ishiguro] did, or would you build one to look like a famous figure, like the Albert Hubo?
[via BotJunkie]
Dancing Wall-E And Rhythmic Synth
Whether you loved, hated, or didn’t see Wall-E, it’s hard not to fall in love with the iDance Wall-E toy. Connect him to an audio source and Wall-E will dance around like an epileptic Billy Bass.
[Gian Pablo Villamil] at NYC Resistor wondered whether it would work with his custom made Rhythmic Synth, and to his and our delight, it does! The Rhythmic Synth is an older project of his; it is a simple rhythm generator with 4 pitch knobs, 4 modulation knobs, and 4 phase switches. The case was taken from an old external Iomega CD-ROM drive.
Getting the Wall-E to dance isn’t much of a feat, but something about the dancing combined with a synth with embedded lights just screams robot dance party, and that can never be wrong. We’d love to see the Wall-E dancing to a cleaner, more complete synth: maybe this one. Check out Wall-E busting a move after the break.
Spotlight On Tinyminds
Etsy places a spotlight on tinyminds, creator of the much-hyped solar robots. [Jenny], the brains behind tinyminds and self-described “all round nerd and non-stop crafter”, claims to draw inspiration for her BEAM solar bug and monster robots from things as varied as paper and wood. She describes the process of creating her robots and working with solar energy as “magical”. The fact that they’re solar-powered is a huge advantage – these “pets” never die and never need recharging, only light. Her Cthulhu robot was linked to by BoingBoing Gadgets, and is unfortunately sold out at the moment. tinyminds has plenty of other inventive, equally inspiring robots available for purchase.
