Matthew writes – “There are a lot of LEGO Mindstorms robots out there, but I finally found the best. Nic_1 is a Johnny V impersonator that detects the direction of sound and follows it. Detection is accomplished by calculating the cross-correlation of two audio signals from the binaural sensor. The data is used to estimate […]
Matthew writes – “Lately the hoopla concerning LED lighting has been overwhelming. Everyone claims this costs mere pennies to power. I decided to put a new twist on a classic science experiment to prove that LEDs do cost pennies to power. Literally.” This is a great how to on making a battery to power a […]
John has a great round up of some retro computer design – “A working eight bit computer made out of Relays! For some time amateur computer designers have been getting ‘back to basics’ and building their own computer designs with individual TTL logic gates wire wrapped together. One determined experimenter even built his own out […]
This robot from NTT Communications in Japan uses RFID tags embedded in the floor to figure out where it is, information about the stores and will carry your bags around for you. I suppose if you buy something that also has a RFID tag in it, the robot could suggest something to go with it […]
The best free DIY PVR MythTV has a new version – From the release notes…“LiveTV rewritten to support saving buffered content while watching. Signal Monitoring for DVB and pcHDTV recorders. Ending times may be changed while recordings are in progress. Playgroups allow for default playback options on recordings. Channel changes can be made across tuners […]
Vermin writes – “I stumbled across this bit of overkill describing the construction of a PVR (personal video recorder) with the following specs: 4 x HDTV tuners, 7 x SD tuners, all can work simultaneously, 4 x 250GB drives – 1TB of storage space, 112 hours of HDTV recording or 424 hours of SD recording.” […]
Geo writes – “The “vanilla flavored” wall switch from x10.com, the “WS-467”, comes without local dimming capability: Though you can dim it from a remote controller, you can’t dim it by hand by pressing its button. Strangely, it requires MORE components for them to make it WITHOUT local dimming capability. Shorting across the extra components […]
