Monitoring power lines can be done by people but it is a time consuming and expensive. It’s a job that needs to be done because of inventions like the Bat Hook Power Tap. Hydro-Québec Research Institute and BC Transmission Corporation have developed a robot that is capable of inspecting these lines while they are still powered. That’s not a big deal right since the power lines is a perfect platform
We have seen KUKA Robot Arms turned into DJ music machines and ice cream machines but this F1 Ferrari Simulator is something else! Paolo Robuffo Giordano and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany are the ones behind this cool idea. Via: PopSci “The CyberMotion Simulator is basically a full motion simulator adapted to a racing car game. Players (or subjects, the researchers prefer to
We all know Airsoft to be a fun safe sport right? Airsoft guns shoot small round plastic pellets which can sting a bit but it’s all in good fun similar to a paintball. Kuba sent in a link to his Multi-Barrel Airsoft Machine Gun which is a bit more intimidating. There are going to be lots of tutorials on the site, a few are complete like this one. The huge
We have seen lots of creepy robots but I think the Telenoid might be at the top of the heap. Not sure about the abdomen though, I think if it had some legs and a pair of pants the creepy factor would be much lower. This is meant to be a new form of tele communication but I think when Apple gets the bugs worked out of FaceTime I would
Barnaby Jack of IOActive demonstrated how to hack into an ATM machine without needing physical access to the machine. Turns out the manufacturer used their own home made encryption scheme that obviously wasn’t very secure. Once the system was comprised a new customized version of the firmware was uploaded to give the machine a jackpot mode. You might remember about 4 years ago when these same ATM manufacturers were caught
Our friend Daniel Eindhoven from Megavolts found a great price on some huge used capacitors. These capacitors normally cost around $90 each, Daniel was able to pick them up for around $2 a piece! That is one hell of a huge capacitor bank on a nice budget. He also designed an interesting mechanism to tie the batteries together. Instead of using wire or busbars he designed a few laser cut
Andres Guzman-Ballen, a Senior at the University of Illinois studying Computer Engineering sent us an email about his latest project. It is a Wireless Electric Mountainboard. You can see the video below of the hard wired version that he built when he wanted to debug some issues he was having with the wireless setup. “I chose a mountainboard because the truck design allows the rider to carve more since the
