How cheap can you make a cellphone? Bunnie Huang recently bought one in Shenzhen for just $12. There wasn’t a carrier subsidy, it was contract-free, and unlocked. As Bunnie says, “…that about the price of a large cheese pizza, or a decent glass of wine.”
I came across an excellent bit of wizardry by Rasmus Andersson called PeerTalk. It’s a Objective-C library allowing you to communicate between your iPhone and your Mac over the USB dock cable using TCP sockets. My immediate thought was that the same mechanism should be able to be used to talk to something like the BeagleBone, or the Raspberry Pi, not just your Mac.
Fashion designer Nukeme has teamed up with some other artists and hackers to make a project called “Hacked Knitting Machine and Glitch Knit,” in which they’ve made another knitting machine hack and are using it to knit glitch patterns!
I’m totally doing this. Call For Entries: Announcing The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! Share your cool project in 6 seconds of video and win up to $600 at the Adafruit store, with six runners up winning $60 store credit each. In a 6 second video, we want you to share the best project […]
Building your first quadcopter is almost a rite of passage for anyone interested in DIY drones these days, mainly due to the availability of boards like the Ardupilot making it a lot easier to get started. However seven Masters students at Queen Mary University of London just raised the bar for the competition. They built a solar powered Quadcopter, which they dubbed Solar Copter.
I’ve already shared some images of combat and humanoid robots from RoboGames, but there’s a lot more to see than just that. Here’s a slideshow of “the rest”, which there was quite a lot of.
Humanoid robot competition is one part of RoboGames that seems to be dominated by Japanese roboticists. Lem Fugitt, who runs Robots Dreams, has been involved with the humanoid robot scene in Japan for nine years, and tends to bring a few “professional” Robo-One players with him on his annual trip to RoboGames. We spoke with him about how he got involved in the Robo-One scene and how 3D Printing has started to benefit the builders.
