If you are looking for a new cool project check out this Vision Tracking System Kit from Trossen Robotics. Put this on a robotic platform, stick a red dot on your cat and have it chase your cat around the house. 🙂 “The RoboTurret Vision Tracking Kit is an industry first! Never before has it been so easy and so inexpensive to jump into the world of machine vision! Trossen
The guys over at Utah Aerials are having some fun over the US Thanksgiving Holiday by making a Turkey Quadcopter that can drop Pies! These are the same guys that made the Flying Mr T that we saw a few months ago. “It is constructed of four long sheets of poster-board for the cylinder, and smaller pieces for the head, wings, and tail with some small parts that are folded
Joe Grand who you might remember from Prototype This has been working on a Laser Range Finder, he has been nice enough to share his build issues and successes over at the Parallax Forums. He demonstrates how a CMUcam can be used to look at the reflected laser dot to determine range based on triangulation. The Parallax CMUcam he is using looks like it is currently out of stock at
Magnetic Swipe Cards are used everywhere, probably the most common one that we all have in our wallets is the one that is built into our bank and credit cards. Craig from the Flashing LEDs blog was had a reader that was sitting around with no purpose. He swiped his University ID through it and found that the only thing on track 2 was university ID number, this card system
The guys over at Motocross Boards have built some cool looking motorized boards, they remind me of the Wheelman that we saw about 4 years ago but check out this battery operated version! The MXB Shocker has a 1,500-watt, 48-volt brushless DC motor that is capable of pushing the machine to 35 mph. This looks like one amazingly fun ride and when you get to where you need to go
Thanks to Protostack for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a USBASP AVR Programmer to the winner. The AVR programmer is based on the Thomas Fischl’s USBasp design and connects to your computer’s USB port. “Some of the features include: Support for AVRDude from version 5.2 onwards Allows you to to read or write the microcontroller EEPROM, firmware, fuse bits and lock bits Support for Linux, Mac OS
Jee Labs has some interesting modules that can be used as cool building blocks or if you want to build your own based on their ideas you can because all of the design details have been released. This Indoor Temperature, Dewpoint, Humidity and Pressure Monitoring System is a great example of what can be done with a few of these modules.
