Want your very own robot to learn to do your job? Sylvain Calinon and Aude Billard from the Autonomous Systems Lab, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne have made great strides to make that dream happen. Additional information. Read a paper on their research. (PDF) “This video shows how a humanoid robot can learn incrementally new skills by interacting with a human instructor. By using active teaching methods that
There was a time when NASA Tech Briefs was required reading in every cube farm. Subjects from agriculture to zoology where covered and some times in a light hearted way. Well now NASA sponsors the “Create the Future Design Contest”. Not only does every entrant get a tee shirt, they can also earn $250 if their entry is one of the most viewed. One of my favorite entries is the
Looks like the University of Alaska Fairbanks has grouped the engineering and culinary arts programs together. 🙂 “How does an electrical engineer cook a hot dog? 1.5 A for 60 seconds! Taken at the E-Week open house put on by the engineering departments at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.”
This Speaker Power Detector might be a project that you want to add to your existing stereo system. The author is working on a revision so it may be something to do in the near future if you don’t want to implement the prototype design. “The circuit revolves around the LM339, a low-power comparator designed to be easy to operate from a single (positive) power supply. A comparator compares two
Merry Christmas from everyone here at Hacked Gadgets, keeping the hacking tradition alive the video today is three roomba robots performing Christmas carols. 🙂 “Make your Roomba a musical instrument! RoombaMidi2 is a small Mac OS X program that makes your Roomba appear as a MIDI interface to MIDI sequencer programs like Ableton Live, Apple Logic, and so on. RoombaMidi2 is an update of the original Java-based RoombaMidi. The
Any website that an RSACi rating of V4 for violent content and describes it’s contents as “fantastically dangerous” is worth my time to look at. William Beatty put together ” CAPACITOR-BANK DISCHARGE EXPERIMENTS” for those of us who think coins are just to big. There are a couple of busted links but plenty of potentially fatal fun. If you have never played with high voltage please be careful.
Plasma globes are fascinating. I didn’t think the technology behind them was very complicated. Turns out there is quite a bit of tuning that is possible. This Plasma Globe Controller can adjust the frequency along with other parameters to create new viewing experiences!
