The new Cornell University ECE 4760 projects are out! This  Clap Follower Robot will sit and wait until it hears a loud clap like sound and immediately turn and move towards it. Tejaswini Srinivasa and Asmaa M’nebhi designed it to ignore normal room sounds such as people speaking but as soon as a sharp sound like a clap is made it immediately senses it and jumps into action. They are
Dustin Evans wrote: “I installed Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi and used a tutorial from Adafruit to make its own wireless access point. Once that was setup I installed XBMC. Now when my phone connects to the Pi’s access point I can stream video files to it using AllCast.”
 When you don’t want to drive your robot wouldn’t it be nice to just point in a direction and have it go there? Well the issue is that every little bump and wheel drag will slowly adjust the direction so where it ends up after 50 feet will most likely not be where you intended. Iron Jungle from Whiskey Tango Hotel used a LM303DLHC which is a Micro
Jack Minardi hacked a remote control to allow it to be controlled by an electronic signal rather then a push button. This remote allows him to take control over the remote that can turn on 110 volt outlets. Of course you could simply use a relay and control the AC itself but there would be no Rube Goldberg aspect there… Although this system is nice that it is wireless
Our friend Pyrofer wrote in about his new VFD Clock. “It sets itself via NTP and adjusts for daylight savings time so no buttons and it never needs adjusting. It can be monitored via SNMP for logging the temperature and checking system uptime. The entire SNTP stack was written from scratch and it all fits in one AVR 328P. For a screen I am using a salvaged VFD from
Looks like Itead is trying to get the Arduino clone price way down. They have setup an Indiegogo canpaign that has prices a low as $5 per board. The individual $5 boards have gone but you can still get shipped boards for $8 or 3 boards for $20. When you consider shipping is included in this the price is rock bottom. Itead is based in Shenzhen, China which is the
mikeselectricstuff gives us a one hour video describing how he goes about reverse engineering. He was trying to see how easy it would be to use the tiny LCD displays which are normally used in the iPod Nano 6. It is often good to look to see what very popular components are used in mass produced electronics since they are often available inexpensively as a repair item. Mike suggests
