When I was younger, I spent hours perusing Bill Beaty’s electrostatics web pages. At the time, I didn’t achieve any real successes trying to build his high-voltage contraptions, and so my interest waned. Years later, I saw someone online use a soda can as a collector for their Van de Graaff generator, and all my […]
Build a robust R/C flying-wing airplane that’s fun to fly and great to learn on.
See photons turned into motion with this solar-powered, magnetically levitating electric motor.
Tacit is a wearable system that translates the distance to anything you aim your hand toward into pressure on your wrist. The closer the object, the greater the pressure. Sweep your hand around, and the device conveys to you a tactile image of your surroundings. I designed Tacit to help vision-impaired people navigate their environments, […]
It might have been Robots of Saturn that first got my young brain thinking about building a mechanical man. In that obscure 1962 sci-fi adventure novel, Dig Allen and his fellow teenage space explorers transfer their thoughts into the bodies of teleoperated robots to mine Saturn’s dangerous rings for precious Methane-X. Using some of my […]
At BeatBots, we believe that dancing is one of the most worthwhile occupations a robot can have. We like making cute characters move in interesting ways, and as you’ll see, this doesn’t require expensive components or complicated programming. For Spazzi here, we decided to forego the rotational motors (servos and steppers) that many robots use. […]
It all started with a small LCD salvaged from an old printer. I recruited my code-savvy older brother, Adam, and we soon had the LCD displaying text from an Arduino microcontroller. This was neat, but it was inconvenient having to plug the Arduino into a computer for reprogramming whenever we wanted to change the text. […]
