Robomaid Hacked
Neoteric writes “This is my second robot after getting the kit for Christmas. No prior electronics experience. The robomaid redo I have been working on is complete. I call it Robomaid2. It uses the outside of this product. It uses 5 IR pairs. 2 in front, 2 on the side, one in back. The front pair is for detecting mfront collisions. The theory of the side pair is that the robomaid2 can hang very close to the walls and cupboard bases, where most of the dust is. (I have not completed the code for this, although it works pretty well like it is) The back IR helps when the robot gets a little too cramped. It rotates, and the back IR helps it get out of loops by kicking the robot forward.” [via] Link.
Phil writes “Spare time projects of engineers. Some wierd, some wonderful. It’s a regular feature of Design News magazine, and always gets passed around here in the lab – Design News celebrates the third anniversary of the Gadget Freak files. This popular column, sponsored by Allied Electronics, profiles the sometimes useful and always entertaining inventions that Design News readers come up with in their spare time.” 
Dhruv writes “This page has great animations that break down the complicated process behind creating a single transistor (the basic building block of almost all computer chips).” 
This little robot car from Nakamura-san at Himeji Soft Works in Japan drives around then it transforms into a real robot and walks around. I want to build one of these or buy one immediately. [
Devin writes “These pages are a nice guide to making high voltage items (toys?) out of trash! These two pages show how to make a Tesla Coil out of trash, and how to hook up TV flyback ransformers for all sorts of fun HV stuff (arcs, jacob’s ladders, capacitor-bank charging, coin-shrinking, etc.)” 
Greg writes “These guys took a girl’s prom glove, and attached an accelerometer to one finger. They also attached 4 buttons to the middle finger. They use an Atmel Mega 32 to interprate the signals from the sensors on the glove and to create the RS232 serial output for the computer.” 
Matthew writes “Previously, E-DSP visited the possibility of using your sound card as a signal/function generator. I was curious about the results, but did not have a Windows machine close by to test it. After some searching, I found a Linux alternative and was able to test the limitations of my Sound Blaster Live!”