What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer […]
There are a couple decent software packages available for using your soundcard as an oscilloscope. Using the line-in or mic-in will allow you to sample signals below 44.1kHz with 16-bit resolution (depending on your soundcard). For Linux, there’s an open source GTK package called xoscope that is pretty well maintained. On the PC side, you […]
Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon University figured out how to use the Wiimote’s infrared camera to track his fingers, Minority Report style. Link. (Thanks, Matt!)
With just a wire, a wood screw, and a drinking straw you can go MacGyver on your PC’s WiFi and make yourself an omnidirectional “range extender” antenna, similar to what you’d find in the store for $30. There isn’t a lot of talk about the reasoning behind the antenna design… it’s just a straight duplicate […]
MP4 | Hi-Def | Blip | Youtube | PDF | Subscribe This week, take the first step towards making your own self-replicating rapid-prototyping robot! You can order up your boards, from the Reprap foundation or make your own since the whole project is open source. Get your parts and solder these up and test them! […]
What works well for a gaming input device also appears to be a useful tool for human robot interaction. University of Calgary students Cheng Guo and Ehud Sharlin performed a study in which participants tried to pose Aibos and navigate them through obstacles using both keyboards and a Wiimote-based gesture interface: For the navigation tasks […]
Dave Nance used an ordinary door peephole fitted to a lens cap to produce some whimsical looking images like the one above. Depending on the optics used in the peephole (many are made of plastic) and whether you choose to use a tripod to compensate for the decreased amount of light, you can really end […]
