Eric S. Raymond, hacker icon, open source scholar, and lead developer of GPSD (an open source program used to communicate with GPS devices) is in need of a weatherproof enclosure capable of holding at least eight GPSs at a time, such that they can be readily used for software testing. He’s made a blog post […]
Here’s a clip of Liquid Robotics founder and CTO Roger Hine talking, at the most recent Bay Area Maker Faire, about the innovative design of his company’s Wave Glider robot boat, which converts the up-and-down motion of waves at the surface into energy for propulsion. More technical details are available on Liquid Robotics’ site. On November 17, Liquid Robotics launched four…
Mark Crosbie’s Lego Street View Car that we blogged in June is back, completely rebuilt: I wanted to re-build the car to only use the Lego Mindstorms NXT motors. I was also keen to make it look more….car-like. The result, after 4 months of experimentation, is version 2.0 of the Lego Street View Car. Every […]
Check out Flickr user Rumtopf’s fancy take on the reverse geocache box. For those who don’t know, a reverse geocache is a box that unlocks itself when the GPS sensor inside senses that it’s in a specific spot on the globe. Rumtopf used a snazzy doorbell button to wake an Arduino, which checks the GPS and displays the distance from that spot on an LCD. He also used a magnetic child safety lock as a backdoor to access the inside of the briefcase in case of malfunction.
Andrew Holme built this incredible four-channel GPS receiver using a repurposed FPGA board from a previous frequency synthesizer project. Connected to a PC running a console app, Andrew’s receiver is capable of tracking four satellites simultaneously, which is good enough to capture lat, long, and altitude.
QR Code Island is a delightfully hare-brained concept design from Mat Barnes and Eddie Blake, which will continue to delight me until news appears that someone is actually trying to build such a thing.
As gimmicks go, this one from diver and photographer Andreas Franke is pretty smart: The novelty of an “underwater gallery” is likely to bring lots of attention to his work in the press (heck, it worked for me), and the situation of the exhibit itself pre-screens for clients who are wealthy enough, both in terms of free time and in terms of disposable income, to appreciate and buy expensive art.
