HOW TO – Controlling the World with your PC
Inverarity writes in regarding serial port projects for PCs – “There’s a great book for this stuff, Controlling the World with your PC, by Paul Bergsman. I loved this book when I was a young tinkerer (alas I have much less time for tinkering these days, which is why I live vicariously through Makezine.) Mr. Bergsman also used to write for Circuit Cellar, I think. The book has general tips for interfacing with the parallel port, as well as designs for driving LEDs, relays, stepper motors, and lots of other stuff. Great fun!” Link.
William on GoRobotics writes “The popular educational and hobbiest company, Parallax is finally 
New SLR! Saturday, January 21, from 6 – 8 PM in LA. “This exhibition will feature the newest addition to the SRL machine family- the Sneaky Soldiers- near life sized, remote controlled army of revolutionaries. Also included in the exhibition will be large-scale documentary images, and the premier of the video from SRL’s recent show in Downtown Los Angeles. This video features the first invasion of the Sneaky Soldiers. The SRL commentary on the art of war debued a Sneaky Soldier emerging from an 18-foot tall wooden Trojan horse to face danger from large-scale destructive robots enduring the pain of flame and damage through a hail of sparks and projectiles.” [
Derek writes “The gumbrix came about because so many of my robot projects required the kind of rapid prototyping that Lego really excels at, yet required more in the way of control electronics than Lego was capable of. With a maximum of 3 motors and 3 sensors, the Mindstorms kit was not really capable of the more complicated control strategies that I was interested in.” [
Robotsrule writes “I have made a new video to show some of the capabilities of the new, upcoming version 3 of Robosapien Dance Machine, the free open source program that lets Windows PC users create complex scripts to control their robots, and control their robots using just their voice. This 1 minute 3 MB video demonstrates the support that version 3 of Robosapien Dance Machine will have, for all of WowWee’s robots; including the Robosapien V1, Robosapien V2, Robopet, and Roboraptor robots.” [
Amazing video of an RCX robot using vision command (or a derrivative) to play pong on a real screen. Jmarco writes: “I have designed a Mindstorm Robot who plays Pong game. It have a Webcam, and it’s controled through Infrared with the laptop computer. There is not trick. It truely plays itself!” [
Mike Smyth makes these incredible compressed air engines. On his site, he has photos and information on the V-twin and radial air engines he designed and constructed. The videos give you a good idea of how they work. His homepage also has his