If you are one of those people who never has the right cable when they need it then this project is for you. Turn one cat5 network cable into the Megatron of cabling by wiring custom adaptors and bridges. This straight through cable can transform into a crossover, serial, serial null-modem, cisco console, vga or vga extension cable by using four adapters, two links and one couple. Link.
Tom writes “The first of 2 planned Robotic Feral Public Authors has been completed and is ready for its first field trial in London Fields next week: The robot has two sensors (air quality and carbon dioxide) and GPS location sensing. The sensors were selected to reflect the concerns voiced in our community pollution mapping workshop back in November, which identified air pollution as the key environmental issue of local residents. The robot communicates its Lat/Long position and sensor readings back to the Urban Tapestries public authoring system via a WiFi connection.” [via] Link.
Alexandre made his own door opener – “I sit about 5m from my office’s door. So, every time someone ringed the bell I had to stand up and open the door. That would be fine if the door did not have an electric door opener just next to it! An ingenious device that allows you to open the door by simply pressing a button. Because of this, the device had no use at all. After all, if you were in front of the door, you could simply open it using the handle. Thus my goal was to give a purpose for the simple life of this poor electric door opener (and, of course, to save a walk of 5m ten times per day).” [via] Link.
This might be a good Roomba mod project…“Grower is a small ‘rover’ vehicle which navigates around the periphery of a room. It hugs the room’s walls and responds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air by actually drawing varying heights of ‘grass’ on the walls in green ink. The Grower robot senses the carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the air via a small digital CO2 sensor.” Thanks James! Link.
Neoteric writes “This is my second robot after getting the kit for Christmas. No prior electronics experience. The robomaid redo I have been working on is complete. I call it Robomaid2. It uses the outside of this product. It uses 5 IR pairs. 2 in front, 2 on the side, one in back. The front pair is for detecting mfront collisions. The theory of the side pair is that the robomaid2 can hang very close to the walls and cupboard bases, where most of the dust is. (I have not completed the code for this, although it works pretty well like it is) The back IR helps when the robot gets a little too cramped. It rotates, and the back IR helps it get out of loops by kicking the robot forward.” [via] Link.
Phil writes “Spare time projects of engineers. Some wierd, some wonderful. It’s a regular feature of Design News magazine, and always gets passed around here in the lab – Design News celebrates the third anniversary of the Gadget Freak files. This popular column, sponsored by Allied Electronics, profiles the sometimes useful and always entertaining inventions that Design News readers come up with in their spare time.” Link.
Dhruv writes “This page has great animations that break down the complicated process behind creating a single transistor (the basic building block of almost all computer chips).” 