I first saw the EggBot in action at MakerFaire and then waited to get in the queue to get one as Evil Mad Science prepared the kit for sale (just as I await their Digi-Comp II now). As I was just getting started, I went through a lot of ping pong balls — which were ideal to practice on although a bit small. I later moved on to ornaments and eggs. My first original design [...]
While walking around Akihabara in Tokyo, we stumbled across a robot competition. This was totally unplanned on our part but it turned out to be a Kondo Robotics humanoid robot competition. The small shop was packed but we captured this video of one of the matches from outside the shop. This match resulted in one of the robots being thrown out of the ring by the other bot.
While visiting Tokyo, I spent some time in Akihabara where I stopped at the vStone Robot Store. I spotted a new balancing bot they had called the Beauto Balancer Duo (Reseller with English translation) and brought one home. Two motors mount under the circuit board and use encoders. The two AA batteries are mounted high up with spacers to raise the center of mass. An optional radio control module (shown in the photo) mounts to [...]
I first saw Pololu’s 3pi robot in action at MakerFaire 2009. It was an impressive and agile line follower with a well-designed compact body. I brought one home and came to realize that it was even quicker than I’d seen at the show. I took some poster board and electrical tape and laid out a maze pattern. The video below shows the 3pi learning the maze (code available on the pololu site). The second video [...]
I met the Macetech guys at Makerfaire 2009 in San Mateo and picked up a number of ShiftBrites. This was my first of several multi-RGB LED projects. I decided to array the 16 Shift Brites I had into a 4×4 matrix on a piece of 24″x24″ inch plywood (one of the sizes that comes precut at stores like Home Depot). I evenly spaced a grid of 16 holes just big enough for the ShiftBrite LEDs [...]
The Secret Knock Gumball Machine is a project I built from the plans and instructions from Steve Hoefer’s article in Make magazine (volume 25). Gumballs are dispensed only to those who use the secret knock on the front of the machine. The machines uses an Arduino as the controller and a piezo sensor to detect the knock. The machine can also learn new knocks with a single button press. I used Oak plywoood for my [...]
I thought I’d share another project from a few years back. Back in late 2007 I just finished up my third DARPA Grand Challenge Event (as an author of the pre-event simulator and real-time tracking software used to run and judge the event — which unfortunately precluded me from participating on a team). So I started thinking it might be nice to build my own (albeit small sized) bot — starting with tele-robotic capabilities and [...]
After attending Adrian Crenshaw’s talk at DefCon18 (slides, video) on using the Teensy as an exploit tool, I was inspired to give it a try. I took a Teensy and added an RGB LED, photo sensor, DIP switches, and a keyboard connector to experiment. I had fun trying it in various ways. Ultimately, I used the DIP switches to set which platform it targeted for the exploit (Windows, Mac, or Linux) as well as what [...]
For Halloween 2009 my daughter got a butterfly princess costume. We thought it might be nice to light it up for safety and a nice effect. I thought of EL wire, which I’d just discovered and bought some including a sequencer from CoolNeon. I decided on a pattern involving four loops on the wings as well as an outline around the edge. Stripping and soldering EL wire takes some patience but I found it wasn’t [...]
I was intrigued by Mikal’s article on his Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box from Make issue 25. This is a box which will open only in a very specific place (as determined by its internal GPS system). The LCD display shows how far the place the box will open is from the current location. You can find Mikal’s story about his puzzle box in the article and on the web. In Mikal’s example, there was one [...]
