Lightweight Robosuit Is Like Stilts On Steroids

March 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 49 Comments

What would you do if you were a foot or two taller? How about if you had an arm span two times as wide as you have now?

A group of Japanese engineering students asked themselves the same question and built a wearable chassis that does just that. Their project is called “Sukerutonikusu”, which we believe roughly translates to: “This is freaking awesome, we’ll take two!”. [Thopter] however informs us that it translates to “Skeletonics”, a fusion of the words “skeleton” and “mechanics”.

The suit is comprised of lightweight aluminum pipes and sheeting, allowing for it to be powered solely by the person wearing it. Stepping inside the chassis looks like it lifts the wearer about a foot and a half off the ground, while increasing their wingspan by nearly 6 feet! In the video embedded below you can see that while in the suit, the wearer is quite agile, and even has the ability to run at a decent tick.

If this ever comes to market, you can bet we will buy one in a heartbeat – until then, we will have to settle for making RoboCop sounds as we walk about the office.

Continue reading “Lightweight Robosuit Is Like Stilts On Steroids” →

CAN Sniffing For Steering Wheel Button Presses

March 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

You can make those buttons on your steering wheel much more functional if you have a way of monitoring them. Don’t even think of cracking open the factory finish to get to the solder points, just tap into the CAN bus and monitor the data traffic.

The small board seen above is the result of a project [Peter Shabino] calls the CAN sniffer. The connector on the left will plug into the Control Area Network system on your car, giving the chips on board something to do. There’s an MCP2551 CAN transceiver (hidden under that linear regulator) and an SPI controlled MCP2515 CAN controller which take care of the particulars of the CAN protocol. The big chip in the middle is a PIC 16F876, responsible for making sense out of the data. From there a MAX232 chip is used to provide a serial interface to connect the device to a computer.

This really isn’t tied down to one particular function. Once you have access to the bus for a microcontroller you’ll only be limited by your firmware writing skills. [Peter] has posted an archive with all of the open source files, as well as an illustrated step-by-step board assembly. We’ve embedded the schematic from that archive after the break. Continue reading “CAN Sniffing For Steering Wheel Button Presses” →

Autonomous Cars Already Drive The Roads Among Us

March 5, 2011 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

Google’s showing off this autonomous car at the TED convention right now, but the hardware has already made automated trips from San Fransisco to Los Angeles. According to the commentary in the video after the break, the scene above shows the car “hauling Prius ass” on a closed course. The car learned this route while being driven by a person and now the vehicle is set to take riders through an aggressively driven loop in the cone-adorned parking ramp. But on the open road you do not need to teach it anything. It has no problem taking a GPS route and following the rules of the road while traveling from one waypoint to another.

The link above doesn’t include hardware information but they did point to a Times article which includes an infographic. The spinning box on the top of the car is 3D-mapping LIDAR with a 200 foot radius. There’s a rotary encoder on one of the wheels for precise movement data, radar sensors on the front and back bumpers, and a rear-view-mirror-mounted camera for image processing. It makes us wonder how the system performs when the car is coated in road-muck? Maybe you just add a dedicated wiper for each sensor.

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Racking Up Miles On A Bicycle Odometer

February 25, 2011 by Noah Dunker 27 Comments

[jonh] religiously tracks the miles he rides on his bicycle. When his odometer’s battery started getting low, he wanted a way to run the miles up to where they were before, since replacing the battery resets everything to zero. [jonh] used an Atmel microcontroller to run up the miles on his bike computer so he could pick right back up where he left off. There is definitely a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off joke in here somewhere.

The bike computer itself is designed to plug into a base that connects to a magnet-triggered reed relay. It uses a wheel-mounted magnet to count the number of revolutions made and thus the distance traveled. [jonh] hooked up a simple microcontroller-driven circuit to these connectors to trick the bike computer into thinking it was moving, and moving fast! Since he knew the number of miles he wanted to sandbag onto the odometer, he was able to program it to run up the proper amount of miles and then stop. There’s no source code listing for the project, but this shouldn’t be too hard to reproduce. He provides a pencil-drawn schematic for the connection to the cyclometer from the microcontroller. At the end, there’s also some sage advice for those of you who are interested in building a decent hardware hacking lab on the cheap.

Brain Car Interface

February 18, 2011 by Kevin Dady 9 Comments

The AutoNOMOS labs project has found a new way to maneuver its vehicles, your brain. We have looked at a previous version that uses a mostly computerized van under remote control from an iPhone. This one however, named “Brain Driver”, places the operator in the driver’s seat with an EEG strapped to their head.

Going for a more sporty look, the current vehicle is a drive-by-wire Volkswagen Passat wagon filled to the brim with fun toys like LIDAR/ RADAR sensor technology, cameras, and a specialized GPS. The EEG interface is a commercially available Emotiv model, and after a few rounds of training on safe ground, the driver is placed in control of the car.

In one demonstration the car approaches a 4 way intersection, the driver only has to think left or right and the car (intelligently) navigates the turn after coming to a proper stop, and checking for obstacles. In the second demo car and driver are let loose on an unused airport to test responsiveness.

If you like brains, cars, robots, and spinning lasers join us after the break for a video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDV_62QoHjY&w=450] Continue reading “Brain Car Interface” →

Pedal Powered EL Wire Bike

February 14, 2011 by Mike Nathan 31 Comments

el_wire_bike

Instructables user [samsmith17] wanted to cover his bike with EL wire for this year’s Burning Man, but he didn’t want to mess with the hassle of using batteries as a power source. Instead, he decided that his EL wire bike would be powered solely by the rider. In the interest of keeping things green, the entire build is made up of re-purposed parts, aside from the EL wire itself.

If you are not familiar, EL wire only lights up when AC current is supplied, so he decided to use a stepper motor to generate the current required. The stepper motor was mounted against his bike’s wheel, and wired backwards through the AC transformer portion of an old cell phone charger in order to step up to the required voltage. A rheostat was also added to the circuit in order to help prevent an over voltage condition, which could potentially damage or destroy the EL wire.

The end result is pretty cool to watch, and costs very little to boot. It would be nice to see someone expand on his project, adding additional wire colors and perhaps a few capacitors to keep the wire from going dark immediately after the wheels stop turning.

Continue reading to see a quick video of the completed project.

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FareBot – Android NFC Proof Of Concept

February 8, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

farebot_logo

Upon learning that the Nexus S smartphone was equipped with a Near Field Communications NFC) radio, [Eric Butler] decided he would put the newly released Gingerbread SDK to good use. Focusing initially on ORCA fare cards used by several Washington state transit systems, he built an open-source application he calls FareBot, which can read data from any MIFARE DESFire branded cards. Utilizing the NFC radio in the Nexus S, he was able to dump all of the unprotected information from the fare cards, including the remaining card balance and the last 10 locations where the card was used.

The author hopes that his proof of concept application encourages other developers to expand on his project and to explore the data stored on transit cards around the world. While it is in its early stages, [Eric] would ultimately like to see this project expanded to allow the use of NFC-enabled smartphones as transit cards themselves via downloadable apps. He suggests that helping people understand the amount of data which can be freely obtained from these cards will eventually force the manufacturers to better inform consumers of the existing system’s shortcomings, which in turn might spur on smartphone-based transit initiatives.