There’s a growing roster of found-object artists working in what I call mechanical animism, an aesthetic world where the margins between the born and the made have become leaky and distinctions between humans, animals, and machines are fluid and ambiguous. One of the true masters of this genre is Belgian artist Stéphane Halleux. We’ve fawned […]
For the next issue of MAKE, our second robot-themed issue, I’m doing a review of one of my favorite robot-related books, Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It is a seminal work in robotics, especially with behavior-based robotics, BEAM, and other forms of simple, bottom-up robot architectures. Alex at Tinkerlog decided to build a […]
Here’s a piece on the WowWee RoboCommunity forums about adding LEDs lamps onto the head-stalk of your Rovio. One of the criticisms of the Rovio is the rather poor camera mounted in the head. The lack of lighting on the head-stalk doesn’t help. If you try and look up at something with your robo-head, and […]
From the MAKE Flickr pool Joining the modular forces of Arduino and Lego, Greg and Rael built the above-seen motor shield with a convenient plastic brick interface. Head over to Flickr for more project pics. In the Maker Shed: MotorShield for Arduino Kit
With the Bay Area Maker Faire only 6 weeks away, I started getting really excited about seeing old friends from past Maker Faires. Someone I always miss in the interim is Russell. I met Russell (aka Rave Raffe) at the first Maker Faire back in 2006. He’s a sweet guy, towering at 17 feet tall […]
Sixteen teams gathered today to determine whose autonomously-navigating vehicle would be the fastest around the Sparkfun headquarters in Boulder, CO. Four-wheeled rovers (typically built on RC car platforms) dominated the entries, but there were three flying UAVs, and one spheroid (Nathan, with “labrat”, pictured at right). One team had been designed a tethered model rocket […]
Here’s a fun little social experiment. Its creator, Kacie Kinzer, explains: Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city (NYC) with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and […]
