Robotics

Solar-powered miniball

Solar-powered miniball

It may look like some futuristic Christmas tree ornament, but the miniball is part of the BEAM robot family of “rollers.” A miniball is a motorized hamster ball that, sadly, you don’t see in the wild too often. Solarbotics used to sell a miniball kit. This Instructable, by MAKE contributor and Solarbotics intern, Jérôme Demers, […]

Open source swarmbots

Open source swarmbots

One of my fave websites at the moment is Hizook, Travis Deyle’s robot news portal. Here’s a snippet from a piece he posted about the University of Stuttgart and University of Karlsruhe’s open source swarm robot project: I’m a huge fan of so-called micro robots — those with cm length scales, thus μ m3. I’ve […]

New Propeller bot board from Parallax

New Propeller bot board from Parallax

Parallax has a new MCU module optimized for robotics that looks pretty cool. The Propeller Robot Control Board provides all the necessary base circuits needed to build a very powerful mid-size robotics platform. The control board has an on-board USB serial interface to facilitate programming and communication with the Propeller chip. A dual switching supply […]