Barbie’s Blinky Dress
Looks like those years of being a computer engineer have gotten Barbie into soft circuits — this year an available accessory is the Digital Dress.
Technology
LiveBots, Robots Live on the Web
Got a robot on the web? Consider adding it to Livebots.cc, which aggregates UStream feeds from multiple robots that allow visitors to control them through the web. The “hand” robot in the image above was built by the site operator, Navic, who documented instructions on how to build the hand-bot. [via Guilherme Martins]
Black Makers Month: Don Stanford
Most people take for granted so much of the technology around us. One man who doesn’t is my neighbor and fellow Brown University faculty member Don Stanford. He is the genius that helped transform a small lottery machine builder into the world’s leading lottery machine manufacturer. No small task, considering how much money is transacted through these devices and considering how totally critical it is that they work all the time and maintain very secure transactions. What happens when a machine goes down? Well, GTECH would pay the owner of the machine for all the lost revenue until the machine is fixed! Just think about this for a second. What if Microsoft or ATT paid you every time your computer crashed or a call was dropped. I bet that would cause a transformational reliability improvement in Microsoft or ATT’s products!!
Colossal Mindstorms EV3 Dragon Acts Alive
I love this fantastic dragon built from next-generation Mindstorms EV3 parts, created by the Lego Mindstorms Education EV3 team, including product designer Lee Magpili. You can see more of his work at Lego Education as well as his Flickr set. The dragon, Valentine, was built from 6 EV3 microcontroller bricks, 18 motors, and took 30 […]
Switches Made Simple
In this video, Collin gives a comprehensive overview of the humble switch, demonstrating switches of the toggle, DIP, slide, rocker, rotary, and momentary variety, and explains the difference between SPST and DPDT switches in the process.
The MicroGranny, a DIY Granular Sampler
Vaclav Pelousek and friends pack a ton of features into their Arduino-based microGranny musical instrument, including WAV player, sampler, 8 presets with 15 sounds each, MIDI input, and a whole lot of knobs and buttons to play with pitch, loop length, shift speed, and so on. They’re selling kits and will soon release the source. […]
Black Makers Month: Chad Jenkins
Odest Chadwicke Jenkins is my friend and neighbor. If I really wanted to split hairs, Chad is more a scientist than a maker. I will overlook that small technicality because the work that Chad does is profoundly awesome and has mega impact in the world of robotics, which affects every maker working with robots. Chad and I share many interests including video games and robots and I find it interesting that he runs the lab previously occupied by Leslie Kaelbling, one of my former mentors, who is now at MIT. Chad played rugby in college, so you don’t want to mess with him! Chad is so cool, he was recently named as one of the “Brilliant 10” by Popular Science.