Interview with Mark Tilden, Robosapien Inventor
Great interview on You-review.net…“The only difference between a man and a boy is the price of his toys said a wise person many decades ago – and little did they know about the 21st century addiction with gadgets and toys. One man who has fueled this addiction, and at the same time helped bring uber-expensive technology to consumers has been the robotics rock star Mark Tilden. Mr Tilden, a real life rocket scientist, is the creator of hundreds (if not thousands) of robots, based on the simple principles of BEAM ( Biology, Eletronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics).” [via] Link.
Nicrosin writes – “My Lexar JumpDrive gave out on me, I ended up fixing it (a piece was loose on the pcb) but destroyed the case in the process. So I found an Altoids Strips tin and used that for the case. Check out the set for the process.” 
Here is this week’s “Cool stuff being made!” – “Karsten Manufacturing Corporation began in the 1950’s garage of Karsten Solheim, when he set out to build his own club to improve his golf game. What started with a custom line of putters has grown into a full line of drivers, fairway woods, hybrids, irons and putters. Today, Karsten Manufacturing is utilizing the latest alloys, aerodynamic technology and experiences of professional tour golfers to continually improve upon their design and make some of the best selling equipment in the world of golf.” 
Ian’s new Instructable looks great for Nixie tube hackers, but be careful this one requires a lot of care. He writes “This SMPS boosts low voltage (5-20 volts) to the high voltage needed to drive nixie tubes (170-200 volts). Be warned: even though this small circuit can be operated on batteries/low voltage wall-worts, the output is more than enough to kill you!” 
Mac writes “A while back, I happened upon the application note “Interface to Optical Mouse Sensor” on the Kronos Robotics website. It discusses the use of a sensor from an optical mouse for use in position sensing coprocessor on a robot. The application note did not go beyond the proof-of-concept stage. That is, could the sensor be directly interfaced and controlled? Since I didn’t have easy access to the GE mouse described in the application note, I wanted to see if there were other optical mice available that had an Agilent optical mouse sensor, which I could use in its place. I also wanted to go beyond the proof-of-concept stage and acutally use an optical mouse sensor in a robotics application. Before developing that application, though, I first needed to gain familarity with interfacing to the optical mouse sensor in a Forth environment. This webpage describes the hack I did to a BTC optical mouse to enable direct control of the Agilent (now Avago, see below) ADNS-2610 Optical Mouse Sensor and the Forth code written to control it.” [
Cool game on the Flickr blog…“I spent more time than I should have playing Fastr this morning, a game where you are shown a group of pictures from Flickr and have to guess the tag before other people do. It’s hella fun!! OK. Don’t everyone hit this all at once and beat up the server.” 
Sej writes – “My new digital camera came with more accessories than would fit in the included case. I built my own handy container for the rest of the gear. The body is a hard plastic VHS tape case. I used a “dollar store” dog collar and leash to make a closure strap and shoulder strap.” 
