We featured the meticulously-organized workshop that Milwaukeean Cindy Smith shares with her husband, Craig, back in March. Craig saw our recent human-powered lifting devices post and wrote in to share with us the custom snow-plow-tricycle he built for removing light snowfall from his driveway:
Made from a bicycle rim, a length of corrugated plastic hose, a bunch of BBs, and a cymbal stand by Instructables user rhoddity.
And although it remains to be seen if XtraNormal’s business model is going to survive the rising groundswell of interest in the technology, the advent of their ubiquitous text-to-movie software lifts the very last remaining entry barrier to indie movie-makers, which is itself a significant milestone. There can be little doubt we’re going to see a huge explosion of these robo-cartoons in the near future, and correspondingly rapid improvements in the emotive abilities of the speech synthesizers. I’m curious, too, about what the new noun is going to be/already is. Has anybody heard it yet? [Thanks, Maya!]
Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago have just published their design for an entirely non-anthropomorphic robot gripper based on the “jamming” principle. The gripper consists of a spheroid balloon, filled with dry coffee grounds, which can be filled with air or evacuated through the arm. Adding air expands the balloon and lets the coffee grounds flow freely around an object; withdrawing it contracts the balloons and “jams” the grounds in place around that object.
SO. It turns out the 2001 monolith (in)action figure I wrote about last week is one of ThinkGeek’s prank products. You can’t actually buy one. Yet.
It’s a clever trick, really: Call it an “April Fool’s” product, then count the number of clicks on the buy link, and decide based on that info if you really want to manufacture and sell them, or not.
Me? Bitter? ‘Course not.
Anyway, reader Dan Simpson saw that post and commented that
[b]ack in the 70s, I was commissioned to make one of these. I used one inch thick black acrylic plastic, and machined it to a thousandth of an inch accuracy on a vertical mill, then gave it a satin finish. Now, around three decades later, it’s in stores. But I still have my prototype, which is a few thousandths off….
I asked, and Dan was kind enough to provide, this photograph of his prototype. If it looks a bit funny, here, it’s probably because I couldn’t resist the temptation to crop it to 400.0 x 900.0 pixels. Although I am insufficiently evolved to perceive it, Dan assures me that its hyperspatial dimension is equally precise. [Thanks, Dan!]
Father-daughter team use a 3D printer to create awesome nanobot art – My daughter has been fully engulfed by the magic of Avatar like I was thirty-three years ago with Star Wars. Plague Year is too powerful for her just yet, but the technology isn’t. The two of us tried to combine our interests and […]
MAKE magazine columnist and skilled inventor Saul Griffith is hard at work crafting effective eco-friendly alternatives to driving a car for errands within a 20-mile radius: cargo bikes with optimized steering geometry called Onya Cycles. The beefiest style they make can carry you plus 150 pounds of cargo at 20mph. Saul is pictured above in […]
