Delta robots use their parallel linkages to maintain a level end effector. This means they’re perfect for placing objects in factory settings and for looking awesome all the time. This one’s running on Arduino.
Lady Bank’s Rose is a delicate evergreen rose with tiny, puffy yellow flowers. Currently one is just breaking into bloom above the CRAFT and MAKE offices. The best thing about this evergreen beauty is that she is thornless. Thornless! Lady Bank’s is a vigorous climber and flowers freely throughout spring and summer. It’s easy to […]
A company called Lunatic Construction sells giant Lego-esque bricks made out of expanded propylene for use as furniture. They have 3 different shapes of bricks available in 7 colors. Plus they offer clear or pearlescent ABS, metal, as well as light-up versions. [Via Inhabitat]
Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.
“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,’ ” Lawrence says.
This fun project reminds me of the video wall in the Arno movie Total Recall. •Custom Winscape software with configurable screen parameters •Two HD plasma displays for great contrast and wide viewing angles •Video playback resolution of 1920×1080 with sound •Still-image resolution of 4096×4096 •Fully embedded in the wall for aesthetics and silent operation •Tracking […]
As the new spokesperson for Caron yarns, Vickie Howell has created an adorable crochet pattern perfect for the wee ones. Make this easy flopsy baby sunhat that’s actually made up from granny squares!
Ãœbernerdy Swiss lighter-than-air fish that flies with electronic muscles? What’s not to like? The actuators on the airship work – like biological muscles – in an agonist-antagonist configuration. While the actuators on one side of the airship are activated, the corresponding actuator on the other side contracts. Thus the body and tail fin are excited […]
