Month: July 2010

Open source VESA-compliant CNC iPad wall mount

North Carolinian Jonathan Danforth designed this laminated iPad wall mount, which he calls The Walet Mount, for CNC manufacture, and made the DXF files freely available on Thingiverse so you can make your own. The back features keyhole slots for direct-to-wall mounting and VESA-standard holes for mounting to any compliant monitor mount (such as an articulated arm) and the side features a contoured through-hole for the headphone cord. Jonathan will sell you a complete unit manufactured in Plyboo bamboo plywood for $65. [Thanks, Angus!]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan
Visual structure of a zen rock garden

Visual structure of a zen rock garden

Just ran across this fascinating little paper published in Nature back in 2002 by Gert J. Van Tonder, Michael J. Lyons, and Yoshimichi Ejima. In it, the authors apply a simple shape analysis to the layout of the 15 boulders in Japan’s most famous karesansui (or “Zen garden,” as they are often called in the West) at the Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto. The technique they use is called “medial axis transformation,” which, by my understanding, basically means that they took the Voronoi diagram of the boulders in the garden as viewed from above. The paper’s authors explain their method with an elegant analogy:

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan4
Roila: A spoken language for robots

Roila: A spoken language for robots

The Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology is developing ROILA, a spoken language designed to be easily understandable by robots. The number of robots in our society is increasing rapidly. The number of service robots that interact with everyday people already outnumbers industrial robots. The easiest way to communicate with these service robots, such as Roomba […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal6
FM support on Nexus One

FM support on Nexus One

The Nexus One sports the same Broadcom chipset as the HTC Desire, which has FM radio support, though Google has yet to enable this feature on the handset. Luckily the Nexus One is pretty open, so naturally somebody like intersectRaven from xda-developers came along and released a kernel with FM support baked right in. You’ll have to install a custom ROM, but at least it’s possible.

Continue Reading Adam Flaherty