This looks handy for collaborative CAD work, but a little pricey at $995 – “Adobe’s Acrobat 3D software lets people view three-dimensional objects with the Acrobat reader, append notes to the images and send them to colleagues. Typically, design engineers today create a two-dimensional image and send them via e-mail, Bhalla said. Having an embedded 3D image, which people can rotate to view and append with notes, will speed up the design collaboration process and reduce errors…” Link.
Pavel and Richard writes – “Last summer, we had a a lot of fun controlling RoboSapien robot using the serial infrared tower from LEGO Mindstorms version 1.5 kit. However, this required the tower (and thus also a PC) to be in the robot vicinity. Still, thanks to the feedback from the new WowWee family robots owners, we were very keen on seeing that the same program with small modifications can be used for RoboSapien V2, RoboPet, and RoboRaptor …” Here’s how to walk your robo dog with a LEGO bot! [via] Link.
Richard writes “I have designed the hardware of the PIC game system to be able to run severla different kinds of games. It has two standard C64/Amiga/Atari joysticks and video and audio output. The processor is a PIC16F84 running at 12MHz. THe description of the hardware is placed on this separate page as it is the same for both of my PIC-based video games. So far I’ve only made two games, Pong and Tetris, but some day there might be more games for the system.” [via] Link.
Handy Instructable from murph38_99 – “Create a USB car charger for any iPod or other Device that Charges Via USB by splicing together a car adapter that outputs 5v and USB Female plug. The most important part of this project is to make sure that the output your chosen car adapter is between 4.75v and 5.25v otherwise you risk damaging your device. Please verify voltage with a voltmeter.” Link.
“For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.” [via] Thanks Brian! Link.
Daniel made an amazing case mod / MAME cabinet for playing old games, I really like his design. He writes “This is may take on a MAME cabinet. I didn’t have the space for a full-blown cabinet but still wanted the joysticks and buttons so I made this panel. It connects to the tv and is perfect to play from the couch.” Link.
Robert Manner has built an amazing robot that looks and walks like a real Allosaurus – “The robot will be able to move almost exactly like the real dinosaur with its 13 servomotors, several balance systems, and dozens of sensors. The robot does not only recognise the position of its frame and joints, motions, fuse functions, and exterior lighting but also the inside and outside temperatures. Due to its mechanic-electronic spirit level with 8 positions the computer can sense even the slightest tilt angle in any direction. Hence, it is impossible for the robot to fall down under any circumstances.” Thanks Antti! Link.
