Paintball Gun Turret

February 26, 2009 by Eliot 39 Comments

[Jared Bouck] has been sending in his projects for a couple years now. We’ve enjoyed his heavy-duty DDR pads, LCD backlight repair, and ion cooling projects. His latest, an RC paintball gun turret, is our favorite though. He actually rates this as one of the easier projects he’s published; it just took a while to assemble. Several design decisions were made to keep the project simple. Two 32 Degrees Icon-E paintball guns were used. The guns already have electric solenoids for firing, so a special trigger mechanism didn’t have to be fashioned. Q-loaders were used to prevent any ball feed problems. The motors, driver boards, and RC components are all borrowed from combat robots for reliability. He’s hoping to produce a small number of kits based on this design.

Related: We’ve got quite a few sentry gun projects in the archive.

Radio Controlled Beetle

February 9, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 57 Comments

Scientists at the university of California have managed to implant a chip in a giant flower beetle that makes it respond to commands from the computer. They can tell it to fly, stop, turn left and turn right. The controls are done through its optic nerves and wing muscles. Though the article states that flight signals are sent to the optic lobes and steering is done through stimulation of the wing muscles, the video shows steering being accomplished through optic lobe stimulation.

Though we’re sure there’s some grand scientific goal behind this, we can’t help but think (hope) that we’ll be seeing giant robot controlled beetle battles with lasers and rockets.

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.

Modifying R/C Frequency

December 19, 2008 by Caleb Kraft No comments

rc_mod

Cheap radio controlled toys can provide countless hours of amusement, especially when friends have one too. You can’t always plan ahead enough for everyone to have a different frequency and sometimes, it just isn’t an option anyway. There is a solution, and it isn’t very difficult. [frickelkram] takes us through the process of changing the frequency that the toy runs on. He starts with the simplest way, which involves replacing one piece in the controller and simply adjusting the receiver. He notes that this often fails as the receiver just isn’t built to be adjusted easily. He continues to show how to get it done even if the first method fails.

Ripsaw MS1

December 5, 2008 by Eliot 44 Comments

ripsaw

The Ripsaw MS1 is an unmanned ground vehicle built by two brothers in Maine. The tracked vehicle can go 0-60 in 3.5 seconds with an 80mph top speed. In its current form, it has a 2000 pound capacity, which opens the possibility for many different types of weapon systems. Control is provided by two people: one driver and one gunner. They work in independent remote stations. The Ripsaw could potentially be used in any application normally reserved for a tank. It could lead a charge without putting soldiers at risk.

We’ve been watching this project mature since 2005 when it was being marketed as a Grand Challenge competitor. This week it’s being demoed at the Army Science Conference. Check out footage of it in motion below.

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Arduino RC Airplane

November 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

arduino_airplane

[Olivier] told us about this fantastic project where he built his own RC airplane. The airplane itself is nothing special, it is the controls that are worth paying attention to. He used an Arduino Diecemilla , some XBee transceivers, and a SparkFun Wee. The main site is a general overview, but there are links to more detailed breakdowns of how to build some of the parts. There are several videos of him flying it as well.

IPhone Controlled R/C Car

October 17, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2EJ2kouK7U]

Is controlling an R/C car with its own remote too mundane for you? Do you feel the need to involve a web server and an iPhone in the process? This project might just be perfect for you. By connecting the R/C controller to a microcontroller board, and feeding it signals via a website from your iPhone, you can control the car as if you had the original controller in your hand. In case you missed it, he’s lugging a laptop, a circuit board, and the original controller along with him. They do make a few improvements though, such as speed control by using pulse width modulation. I guess that makes up for having to lug the computer around too.

[thanks Humberto]