QRIO and AIBO, the memories (huge photo gallery)
Sony isn’t tops in many areas any longer, but they were one of the best in robot dogs and humanoid robot companion development. Now it seems those are going to get the axe (maybe they’d open source ’em? Good will and all?!)… “Continuing the restructuring in its electronics business, the company said it would end its Aibo robot line, stop development of its Qrio robot, stop development and manufacturing of plasma televisions, and stop selling in-car entertainment products in Japan. It will also kill its Qualia line of pricey, high-specification products.” [via] Link. Here are photos of some good times and memories with AIBOs and QRIOs. We will miss you guys.
Michael wrote up a special how to and guide for MAKE about a robot you can program and control over the web right now! – “Before you roll your eyes and tell me about all the other robots you’ve seen on-line and at robot shows, let me tell you why this one is different. You have to program it, or it won’t do anything. And by that I mean you ssh into the robot, write a program, compile it on the robot, and run it on the robot.” Here’s how it works and how to try it out…
This is an old project using a BASIC Stamp, but I still wanted to get it up here “Identifying color is easy with the new Texas Advanced Optical Systems TCS230 frequency to color sensor. This is a high-sensitivity low-noise light-to-voltage optical converter that incorporates on board blue, green, and red optical filters. The sensor combines a photodiode and an amplifier on a single monolithic CMOS integrated circuit with a color filter over the photodiode. What’s really neat about this sensor is that it provides standard RGB color values with 90% accuracy.” 
