 This interesting flying machine looks like a Jellyfish flying around. Looks like Mylar film is the choice of lightweight film for these ultra light models. Via: Make  “The prototype has a motor-powered crankshaft that alternately flaps opposing pairs of petal-shaped wings. Though its Mylar film and carbon fiber body weighs less than one-tenth of an ounce, its stability stems from its bottom-heavy design, which lets it wobble, but
When you send off your Gerber files to have your latest board made you will be shipped some shiny new board in a few weeks. The process of creating the boards is very time consuming, the video above goes through the many steps of how a 4 layer PCB is created. Most boards are 2 layer but it is interesting to see how the inner layers of the 4
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
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
Jeff Buswell, Clifford Chou and Andrew Knauss from Cornell university made a cool Ultrasonic Range Finder with Haptic Feedback called The Bat Hat for their ECE 4760: Final Project. “For our ECE 4760 final project, we designed and implemented an ultrasonic range-finding hat that uses haptic feedback to alert its wearer about obstacles in his or her path. The hat is equipped with an ultrasonic transmitter/receiver circuit, which is
 Punch Through Design which includes Colin Karpfinger who has been featured here before have been working hard on the next project. They have come up with an interesting product concept called LightBlue Cortado that already has almost 1500 backers and has surpassed their goal of generating $20K in pre-orders by more than $66K. You still have 25 days to jump in at the pre-order price of around $20. This
Lots of things are programmable these days. If you hop into most modern cars you will see switches for things like ride comfort, traction control, performance style etc. When you hop on a bike you would expect the ride to stay consistent. John Brack, David Dang and Broc SommerMeyer from Colorado State have built this Arduino based Bike Shock Project which Allows the Shock to be Programmable. It uses
