Everyone loves a soft robot, and I’m fond of the marine variety. This bioinspired prototype tentacle, made of silicone rubber, not only curls and extends in eerily squidlike fashion, it’s also got pressure sensors embedded beneath its suckers so it can grasp objects, like a cephalopod should.
If you’re planning to build a robot with an Arduino, you’ll likely need a motor shield to drive your motors! The Official Arduino Motor Shield, now available in the Maker Shed fits right on top of your Arduino Uno (or compatible) microcontroller and uses a full-bridge L298 driver to provide 2 channels with 5-12V at 2 amps per channel.
Mark Edelman from NorCalFTC shows the competition area for a yearly teen program in robotics. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011, student teams used their engineering and technology skills to pit their creations against one another in the final tech challenge.
If you’ve ever walked along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan during the holiday season, no doubt you’ve seen the incredible animatronic store displays in the windows of stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman. In this excellent video, Cool Hunting interviews Lou Nasti, the animatronic mastermind behind many of these displays. Lou is the owner […]
Andrew Terranova from Let’s Make Robots mods the Spazzi Robot project from MAKE 27 to use less expensive solenoids. He calls it the EconoSpazzi.
More and more books keep being released about our favorite little microcontroller, the Arduino. Apress offers a new one tomorrow entitled Arduino Robotics. Written by Josh Adams, John-David Warren, and Harald Molle, it’s is a monster 628 pages…
Get a grip with the Telerobotic Gripper Kit from the Maker Shed! This kit includes everything you need to make the Teleclaw featured in MAKE: Volume 27, even the batteries! Assemble the kit and attach it to your robot, rover, or anywhere else you could use an extra hand.
