Johnny Lee from Procrastineering (who we interviewed about 3 years ago) made a great DIY Video Chat Robot project. He is using a Roomba as the movable robotic platform and a netbook as the video conferencing system. Skype is used to do the actual telepresence. We did an article about the Anybot Telepresence Robot recently which is the same idea in a more polished package but essentially provides the same
Where is the best place to house a Datacenter? An old Soviet Nuclear Bunker is the obvious place for the Datacenter! Turns out that this is quite a common situation. Just a warning, the link shown at the edges of the picture takes you to a Russian site that seems to have more details of the data center but also contains some nudity. The bunkers were built to keep tremendous
I had a great time meeting the team responsible for creating the Anybot Telepresence Robot. The founder of Anybots is Trevor Blackwell who was featured on Hacked Gadgets about 5 years ago for his cool electric unicycle. There was an Anybot mingling with the people in the Las Vegas Anybots suite, it was being controlled by Ian Danforth who was back at the Anybots head office in Mountain View California.
I remember spending way too much time doodling on my Etch a Sketch when I was younger. Martin Raynsford from NortHACKton wanted to bring something cool to Maker Faire UK next month and came up with this Etch a Sketch Computer, we have seen similar creations before but this one gets props for how simple it has been hacked together. “Two water bottle caps act as the knobs for the
Would you like to know what it feels like to have bionic legs? I think we would need to talk with Evan Ackerman to hear about what it was like since I don’t think most of us will get to test drive these legs any time soon. Evan got a chance to use the Cyberdyne Hybrid Control System (HAL) at the Consumer Electronic Show 2011. Via: Adafruit
We love the weird and crazy around here. If there is a healthy dose of tech that is even better. You might remember the Multi Mallet Automatic Drumming Instrument that we featured last year. They are adding robots and lots of smarts to the musical system they are making. The music sounds great and Expressive Machines Musical Instruments are going to open source the creations. Check out the Kickstarter page
If you play with MIDI instruments and have an Arduino kicking around, the micro Drum which is an Arduino Based MIDI Drum System might be of interest to you. It is currently under development and should be available soon. If you want to help out in the development of the device you are not too late since it is still evolving. Check out the gallery for more images of the
