The sixth annual Bloggies are here and we just voted for our favorites (there were a lot, but our pick for weblog of the year is We Make Money Not Art. The MAKE blog launched in 2005; we just passed the 3,000-post mark, covering all things do-it-yourself. We hope to do even more this year, so head on over and vote for us and your favorite blogs if you like what we’ve been cooking. Link.
Alex writes “There was a Videopac 7400 with a broken power switch in the attic. Next to it was a NES which only life sign was a blinking power led and blinking screen. These would be my two victims: I would try to fit the Videopac inside the NES-case. Not hindered by any technical skills whatsoever and with a newly acquired dremel-clone, I made a start.” Link.
Southpaw writes “Theo Jansen, Dutch physicist turned sculptor has been perfecting or “evolving” his strandbeest (beach animals) for the past 10 years. They are beautiful Davinci-esque machines, some with dozens of legs, and are designed to roam the beaches on the power of the wind. Included is a link to an interview from October. Hooray for the blurring line between art and engineering!” Link.
Wow, nice project and the MP3s on the site are fantastic! – “SIDman is a portable SID music playing device. If you don’t know what SID music is, then get thee to here now. The SIDman was an experiment to see if a PIC microcontroller could emulate another processor in real time, and still carry out other functions. It seems to have been a success :-). There are still a couple rough edges here and there, but it seems to handle most tunes fine.” Thanks Johan! Link.
Matt writes “This stuff looks pretty incredible. To me the finished product looks a bit like an adobe building. It should greatly increase affordable housing in areas where it would have previously been too expensive.” Grancrete is a spray-on structural cement and here’s an overview of the Grancrete rapid construction process…” Link. Anyone ever use/see this in action?
David writes – “I’ve found a great new use for the old carpet tile samples my Architecture firm gets. I taped together some matching samples to make a rug for my pad. I originally tried this with Interface carpet tiles and carpet tape. The Interface carpet tiles are good for this, because they have a nice, firm, rubber back to them, however, this makes the rug hard to overturn when you’re done taping the tiles together.” Link.
This article describes a servo motor controller that is able to control up to 16 hobby servo motors and its based on the AT90S4414 microcontroller (a member of Atmel’s AVR Family). This servo controller is ideal in cases of building small robotic arms (3 to 5 axes) or small walker mobile robots (quadrapods or hexapods). The servo controller receives position commands through a serial connection which can be provided by using one I/O pin of another microcontroller, or a PCs serial port! Link.
