 Our friend Dave from Plastibots has just completed this great looking Bluetooth Robot that has an IP Camera on board. Dave wrote an Android application called BT Bot Control to allow you to drive your robot around using commands over Bluetooth using your Android phone. The video from the camera is sent back using Wifi. I can just imagine how much fun this would be with a squirt
Olivier van Herpt invented a machine called the Time Writer. It allows any graffiti artist in training to get their message out to the masses with the push of a button. An Arduino controls the action here. The Arduino pulses a number of relays which open and close paint nozzles. The paint mixture is pressurized using a re-purposed water fire extinguisher which conveniently has a valve just like a
Tobias Schmidt built a robot mechanism to time his tea brewing. It uses a Atmel ATmega8 microcontroller to run the show, a 2 line LCD display shows you how much time is left for the brew to complete. A motorized slide was made with two optical limit switches is used to dunk the tea bag into the cup. Tobias is willing to share the code with anyone that is
The prize this week is a breadboard power supply. This contest will run for one week (March 17 – Mar 22, 2013). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Bonus marks for the exact make and mode that this is from! Thanks to Dmitriy for sending in the image. Please do not give the answer
We have all see some complex home automation systems, this video made by Jeremy from The Custom Geek gives a good overview of what is involved behind the scenes. This system lives in the garage and interfaces audio, video, phone, intercom, lighting and alarm system. Since the system is all connected it can do things like mute your pounding music when the door bell rings. Jeremy is also making custom
 NAND Gates are very versatile. You might remember back in the TTL days when you were out of a specific chip you could always grab a NAND chip out of the bin and re-purpose it to work. This NANDputer looks like it would be a bit harder to troubleshoot than the one that I am using to write this on! “While the CPU architecture is fairly conventional, the
Thanks to Jerod Michel for sending in the details of this Armed Mobile Response RC Car that he and his students have built. It can be driven around remotely, it has an audio and video range of 100 meters. If you spot something you aren’t pleased with you can paint your target with the laser and fire the vehicle mounted gun. I have to admit, it is quite strange to
