BarBot 2013 has just been announced: the event will be at the Odd Fellows Hall in San Francisco on October 25-26 and tickets are on sale. Registration for robots is also open— there’s still time to get your cocktail robot ready!
All posts by Lenore Edman
Car Drives WaterColorBot?
At the recent Boing Boing Ingenuity Conference in San Francisco, Super Awesome Sylvia and her dad, Tech Ninja teamed up with Joe Grand and Ben Krasnow to use the data stream generated by driving a car to create input for the WaterColorBot. Largest. Brush. Ever.
Over at Boing Boing you can read more about their hack, which took grand prize for the hack day.
OHS 2013 Highlights: Kilobots
Kilobots are small, low-cost, open source vibrobots designed by the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard to study swarming behaviors. A group of these bristlebot-inspired robots were demonstrated at the Open Hardware Summit.
Photo by Michael Rubenstein.
2013 Open Hardware Summit
This Friday, September 6, we’ll be at the 2013 Open Hardware Summit at MIT. The schedule looks great, and the event is now sold out. Those of you lucky enough to get tickets will love this years e-badge by WyoLum, featuring a programmable e-paper display.
Sconic Sections in the Wild
Our friend John made Sconic Sections for a dinner party, with a slight variation: he baked the scone dough in ice cream cones. That led to a little bit of extra difficulty in slicing them, but the cone also provided an outline for the ellipses, hyperbolas and parabolas.
Automated Mechanical Maze Solver
Over on buildsmartrobots, Sai posted about a mechanical maze solving project. He uses an EBB (the same controller board we use on the Eggbot and the WaterColorBot) to control a couple of steppers to tilt the bed of the labyrinth using OpenCV to see both the path and the ball.
A few seconds of Octolively on vine
Alex Ray (@machinaut) has been playing with our Octolively open source interactive LED kits and says, “Physical computing interfaces are fun.”
Papercraft Seven Segment Clock
Instructables user alstroemeria has lovingly documented a clock build inspired by the D/A Clock by Alvin Aronson.
Each of the paper segments is moved in or out by a servo motor to make the mechanical digital display. The whole thing is run off of an Arduino with a servo controller board and a clock module.
Nicely done, Amazon
Amazon today decided to remind me about some of our past projects through book recommendations. We contributed a bunch of projects to The Hungry Scientist Handbook and were interviewed for Cooking for Geeks. Well targeted, Amazon— perhaps too well…
Inside the ULN2003
Over at ZeptoBars, they have an incredibly detailed “take-apart” post on what’s inside the ULN2003 seven channel Darlington driver chip. The ULN2003 is commonly used for driving LED displays—you can find it, for example, in our Mignonette game.
We often receive comments that while out microchip photos are beautiful and interesting, it is completely unclear how integrated circuit implements basic elements and form larger circuit. Of course it is impossible to do a detailed review of an 1’000’000 transistor chip, so we’ve found simpler example: ULN2003 – array of Darlington transistors.
They’ve stripped off the outer housing and put it under the microscope. They then analyzed the photos to show you what parts make up the individual transistors, resistors and diodes inside the chip.
