We chat with Sam Ortega manager of the Centennial Challenges Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center about the program and how makers have participated in the past, and how they might participate in current and future challenges.
Toy vehicles from plastic bottles are pretty cool. Add an Arduino, solar panel, batteries, ultrasonic range finding, a few servos, some beefier tires, and you’ll have something like Fijibot, an autonomous, self-charging robot.
DIY drones are the rage! Chris flew a quadcopter off the stage, and entertained droves of questions from how much weight the copters can carry, to FAA regulations, and announced that they would have a new ARM-based APM (Ardu Pilot Mega) by Maker Faire New York.
A group of UPenn Engineering students have taken several quadrotors and turned them into robotic musicians. We’ve seen the great swarming abilities of these machines recently, but now using various instruments and noisemakers, these aerial drones manage to plunk out a fairly convincing version of the “James Bond” theme.
Chris Anderson demonstrates the systems of the BlimpDuino. The Blimpduino kit is a very low cost, open source, autonomous blimp kit. It consists of an Arduino-based blimp controller board with on-board infrared and ultrasonic sensors and an interface for an optional RC mode, a simple gondola with two vectoring (tilting) differential thrusters, and ground-based infrared […]
