RSS
Make: Online
Autonomous micro helicopters
While doing research for the next issue of MAKE, I discovered this small company, Centeye, right here in my own Northern, VA backyard. They're developing vision chips for autonomous robotic aircraft. They have several videos on their site, showing various types of tests. Unfortunately, the videos are in WMV format only, and not on YouTube.
The video screen cap above is of a micro helicopter holding its position using only visual information from a ring of six of Centeye's ArzPro sensors, mounted in the yaw plane. No gyro is used. Other videos show obstacle avoidance behaviors and the robot fliers taking control if the operator tries to fly them into something. Cool stuff. We'll have to try and get the engineer behind this to present at a Dorkbot.
Posted by Gareth Branwyn | 10:09 PM in Flying | | Discuss (0)
A Way to See the Wind
Interesting Light: A Way to See the Wind.... This experimental site-specific installation illustrates alternative, sustainable ways of harnessing energy that will explore the power of the wind in the city, visualizing it as an ephemeral cloud of light. The...
Read More
Our Autobot in Odessa
This Transformeresque giant metal guardian, made largely of junked car parts, was reportedly built by a company called Transinvestservice (TIS) outside the city of Odessa in the Ukraine. There's more pics over at English Russia. [via Neatorama]
Read More
Arduino prototyping lap desk
What a great idea, Riley Porter's lasercut organizer for an Arduino, a solderless breadboard, and small compartments for components....
Read More
Projects: Failure and mounting a "scratch monkey"
When the concept of doing a Projects: Failure something came up years ago, originally as the idea for a Make: Books (in case you hadn't realized, "Projects: Failure" is a silly twist on our "Make: Projects" book series brand),...
Read More
Battle Symets are GO!
The fine folks at Solarbotics have put up another Instructable on how to build a cool BEAMbot, this time, a cranked-up Symet that spins like a maniac and can go to the mat against other bots. It's robot sumo...
Read More
Screw-in coffin patent issues
This is a choice selection of images from the application for U.S. patent 7,631,404, which has since issued to Donald Scruggs of Chino, CA. The title is "Easy inter burial container." [via Neatorama]
Read More
Beginner woodworking project for illusionists?
Erik Minnema made this really nice woodworking piece, called side by side. It's pretty easy to build, all you need are a few pieces of wood and an inter-dimensional table saw.
Read More
Brickarms molds
These are the molds custom Lego armorer Will Chapman of BrickArms uses to make his gats. BrickArms was recently mentioned in Chris Anderson's genre-defining Atoms Are The New Bits article in WIRED, cited as an example of an amateur...
Read More
LED people remake
Lim Chen Pin Kenneth made this cute remake of the blinking LED people I built a couple of years ago.
Read More
<3 your maker: MAKE's Valentine's Day gift guide
We're all suckers for romance, even if most of us believe Valentine's Day is a holiday dreamed up by industry fatcats. Here are MAKE's staff picks for ways to celebrate with that special someone, maker style. Read on, it's a...
Read More
Don't walk! Controlling a pedestrian sign with an Arduino
In this tutorial about controlling a pedestrian sign with an Arduino you can learn a few things. #1 how to control relays with an Arduino, which is really useful for a ton of different projects. #2 How to use an IR remote to control your Arduino, another cool technique. #3 Never trust a crosswalk sign with an Arduino hanging out of it!
Read More
UC Berkeley has "Nobel Laureate Only" parking spaces
Well, in terms of available parking, UC Berkeley makes UT Austin look like an airport remote lot in Iowa on a Wednesday in the summer. And according to this official page there are presently seven living Nobel laureates on the faculty there, so I'm guessing there must be at least seven NL parking spaces. Supposedly, regular mortals have to shell out $50 for presumptious malparkage among the elite.
Read More
LEGO PCB Agitator
Etching your own PCBs can be a time consuming chore to say the least. Anything that automates the process or cuts down on the time it takes is usually appreciated. Maker Rui Cabral of Oporto, Portugal pieced together this handy PCB agitator out of LEGO to help him speed things up a bit.
Read More
Volkemon in Space: Additional launch pics
Our favorite armchair astronaut, Rachel, is sleeping off all the adrenalin and exhaustion of covering the STS-130 shuttle launch for MAKE. (Great job, Rach!) So, we crowd-sourced a few more pictures from Make: Online member Volkemon, who was also...
Read More
"Batteries Out of Thin Air"
Gray Matter: Batteries Out of Thin Air @ Popular Science... A battery that runs on air? Why, that’s almost as good as a car that runs on water! Those cars are fantasy, but batteries that run on air are...
Read More
From typewriter to teleprinter
Flickr user numist had a typerwriter that he wasn't using anymore, so he converted it into a teleprinter.
Read More
Turning a motor into a sensor with the Peppermill
Nicolas Villar sent me a sample of the PepperMill, a new sensor board he and Steve Hodges designed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. It's a nifty little board. You attach a DC motor and the board can an output voltage when the motor is turned, and analog signals telling you the direction and speed of the motor. It turns a DC motor into a rotary encoder, of sorts.
Read More
Maker Business: Venturing out...
Kicking off our Maker Business series is this piece by Jeffrey McGrew, who along with his wife Jillian Northrup, and their trusty CNC machine named Frank, are a two-person (and a bot) design and fabrication juggernaut. From their design-build...
Read More
