Make It Last Build #2: The robotic plant
We’re excited to announce the second project in the Make It Last build series: the robot plant.
Robotics
Making a robot can be an incredibly rewarding experience. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, engineering and problem solving. However, if you’re just getting started in robotics, it can also be overwhelming. To make things easier for those who are just starting out, we’ve put together some tips and tricks to help makers bring robots to life! From the basics of assembling your robot to software implementation, these pointers will give you everything you need to get started on your robotic adventure!
Hacked iRobot Create uses Xbox Kinect
The Kinect hackapalooza continues. Here, PhD student Philipp Robbel, of MIT’s Personal Robotics Group, combined an Xbox Kinect with an iRobot Create to come up with KinectBot. It can can generate “detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements […]
Meter Crawler, a robot made from a tape measure
I absolutely love these meter crawlers, built by Keiko Takahashi in 2008.
Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Robots
Another holiday season, another excuse to get other people to buy you robots (or to treat yourself). From bot brains to pets and toys to robots that can help you around the house, there’s something here for everyone. Pleo (PleoWorld, ~$300) Pleo is a robotic dinosaur toy designed to emulate the appearance and behavior of […]
Twitter Monkey
Some people aren’t content with your run-of-the-mill blinking lights. Take, for instance, this Arduino-powered Twitter Monkey from maker Pete Prodoehl. He could have had his script send out an audio alert like everyone else, instead he chose to create this animatronic monkey using an Arduino and a couple of servos. Every time it sees a keyword it goes bananas, flapping its arms about like any excited monkey would do. It may not be your cup of tea if your a nervous person, but it sure does beat your average blip.
Animatronic opera held in a Swedish nuclear reactor
The exhibition Opera Mecatronica is on show in Reaktor 1 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where Ã…sa and Carl Unander-Ââ€Scharin present eight mecatronical opera and dance works. The exhibition room is a unique 13000 m3 space, 35 meters below earth which was Sweden’s first nuclear reactor, designed for scientific research, built in […]
xkcd’s submarine ROV
Renowned webcomic artist Randall Munroe built a submersible ROV starting with a commercially-available parts kit: The kit comes with a good set of underwater motors and a sensitive camera, and this summer I started modifying it to use an Arduino and joystick control, running the whole thing over Cat-5 cable (which significantly lightened the tether). […]
