Technology

Annika O’Brien Plays with Giant Robots

Annika O’Brien Plays with Giant Robots

Annika O’Brien works full time making cool robots. She also founded the popular LA Robotics Club, which has over 1,200 members including high school students, hobbyists and professionals who share an interest in building robots. The club meets in real space to work on projects and participate in presentations, as well as holding classes as part of their community outreach to under-served teens.

Annika’s boundless enthusiasm and outspoken demeanor jumped right through the screen at me as we met via video chat to discuss her experience on SyFy’s ground breaking show, Robot Combat League, where teams control giant humanoid robots duking it out in an arena.

“It’s like WWE wrestling with robots. It was a concept that no one had actually done before,” she said. “It was a helluva lot of fun.”

Continue Reading Andrew Terranova
Iain Sharp’s Treasure Chest Synth

Iain Sharp’s Treasure Chest Synth

Iain Sharp of Lushprojects built this sweet treasure chest synth by adding the boards of his LushOne Synth and LushOne Contour kits to a “treasure chest” jewelry box. Last year my girlfriend’s parents uttered the dreaded phrase “we’re clearing out your stuff”. As a result we acquired a large number of music mags (sold to […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal
Irrigating Your Garden With an Op Amp

Irrigating Your Garden With an Op Amp

Instructables user diy_bloke built this op-amp controlled pump for his garden, using the classic 741 operational amplifier. He wrote a very detailed how-to including showing how to etch a PCB, as well as how to make a humidity sensor out of gypsum: The simplest form of a soil humidity sensor is made from two galvanized […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal4
Using the BeagleBone to Control a Powerful Upper Body Exoskeleton

Using the BeagleBone to Control a Powerful Upper Body Exoskeleton

My senior design team at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a powered upper body exoskeleton for use in physical therapy and assistive mobility applications. We’ve named the suit Titan after the powerful deities of incredible strength and stamina in Greek mythology. The exoskeleton runs off a master BeagleBone microcomputer running Ubuntu Linux and PyBBIO, an open-source Python library for BeagleBone control.

Continue Reading Nick McGill8