Jason Hotchkiss made this amazingly geeky timepiece using persistence of vision and an old hard drive. All the code and schematics are available on Github and he’s diligently documented the process of making it on his blog, Stuff and Nonsense. If you like POV clocks as much as I do, be sure to check out […]
Everyone loves a soft robot, and I’m fond of the marine variety. This bioinspired prototype tentacle, made of silicone rubber, not only curls and extends in eerily squidlike fashion, it’s also got pressure sensors embedded beneath its suckers so it can grasp objects, like a cephalopod should.
Made with ten layers of edge-lit acrylic, Jürgen Grau’s numeric display is a low-voltage facsimile of the old school Nixie Tube displays that so many of us are enamored with.
Drinking our tea in cozy confidence, we plugged the production samples into Arduino, put the unit on our fingertip, and casually looked at the screen for the Processing sketch to perfectly render our heartbeat. [Cue first spit-take.]
MAKE author Tom Whitwell wrote this great piece on how to jump into the synth-building scene. The hardest part of DIY electronics is starting out. My first step was building a few guitar pedal kits and learning by reading the Beavis Audio site. Other people start with noisemaker kits like the Atari Punk Console or […]
Last March, roboticist Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago made headlines with their new, unconventional robot gripper design: a balloon filled with coffee grounds or other grainy material and fitted with a vacuum line. At atmospheric pressure, the balloon is squishy and can be “mushed” around an object—even traditionally hard-to-grip stuff like […]
The clever designers at Chicago’s Tanagram adapted code developed to recognize those little black-and-white augmented-reality markers (“fiduciary markers”) for target acquisition on a DARPA-funded robot that can autonomously deliver humanitarian aid and other supplies to 20′ square markers unrolled on the ground. What’s great about fiducial marker tracking technology is that it is pre-built to […]
