Technology

Desktop “Strandbeest” walker

The work of Dutch physicist-turned-artist Theo Jansen has inspired many, including us here at MAKE. His amazing “Strandbeest” (beach animals), giant wind-driven walking sculptures, are staggeringly cool. A number of miniature machine and robot builders have tried to incorporate some of Jensen’s ideas into their own work. Here, a Japanese maker has built a tabletop […]

Robot Jockey, the sport that never was

Before BigDog and LittleDog, Boston Dynamics Director Martin Buehler was messing around with single-leg motility, here via the Robot Jockey, a sort of semi-self-balancing pogo stick under a motorcycle frame. On Buehler’s website, you can see the evolution, from these monoped prototypes up to the four-legged critters we see bouncing around in BD test videos […]

SensorBib upright bass augmentation

Spencer Russell created a “sleeve” for his upright bass to house electronic sensors which detect his position relative to the instrument. The sensors use an Arduino board to communicate with a computer running PD (PureData) to translate the sensor information into sound. He used Blender and QCad to make a 3D model of his bass […]