Derek writes “The gumbrix came about because so many of my robot projects required the kind of rapid prototyping that Lego really excels at, yet required more in the way of control electronics than Lego was capable of. With a maximum of 3 motors and 3 sensors, the Mindstorms kit was not really capable of the more complicated control strategies that I was interested in.” [via] Link.
Chad writes “For a while I have wanted to control things with a serial port. It was pretty easy to control a relay with a serial port. With a standard serial port you can control 2 relays. (with a parallel port you can control 8 relays, but I don’t have a parallel port on my system). A standard PC serial port has 9 pins. Pin 4 – DTR (data terminal ready) and Pin 7 – RTS (request to send) can be used to control a relay. These two ports don’t actually send data. They are used to signal the other device to tell it when to send data.” Here’s the HOW TO – Link.
“BFO (beat frequency oscillator) metal detectors use two oscillators, each of which produces a radio frequency. One of these oscillators uses a coil of wire that we call the search loop. The second oscillator uses a much smaller coil of wire, and is usually inside the control box and is called the reference oscillator. By adjusting the oscillators so their frequencies are very nearly the same, the difference between them is made audible as a beat note, this beat note changes slightly when the search loop is moved over or near to a piece of metal.” Link.
“A small wireless battery powered device – Turn it on near a friendly wireless network that contains iTunes shares and plug your headphones in. It picks a random iTunes share, picks a random tune and starts playing. Repeat until bored or the batteries are dead. The size of the system is amazing. The main board is about the size of my little finger. By default it’s running an ssh server, a web server and advertising itself to the network with bonjour.” Link.
Robotsrule writes “I have made a new video to show some of the capabilities of the new, upcoming version 3 of Robosapien Dance Machine, the free open source program that lets Windows PC users create complex scripts to control their robots, and control their robots using just their voice. This 1 minute 3 MB video demonstrates the support that version 3 of Robosapien Dance Machine will have, for all of WowWee’s robots; including the Robosapien V1, Robosapien V2, Robopet, and Roboraptor robots.” [via] Link.
You can find these old digital microscopes on eBay for under $20. Here’s a blog that catalogs some of what you can see with them – “Last week, I got myself a toy I’ve wanted to play with for many years — the Intel Play QX3 Digital Microscope. When I was a kid, the old medical microscope my parents bought for me at a garage sale was my favorite toy. I would spend hours putting whatever I could find underneath it… and now, with the digital microscope, I’m doing it again as an adult. I am adding new pictures every day and will continue to do so until I run out of things to look at with the microscope”… [via] Link.
Awhile back we made our own Flickr photo frame from an old Tablet PC we got on eBay, and now there’s a real version you can pick up, too. “The eStarling frame is a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed from Flickr based on your own tagged keywords. You can even shoot photos on your mobile phone then e-mail them directly to your eStarling frame for display.” [via] Link. There are also a ton of other ways to make photo frames, too, if you’re in the DIY mood.
