William on GoRobotics writes “The popular educational and hobbiest company, Parallax is finally offering kits with USB support! The long-standing support of serial control in robotics and microcontrollers continues to be a problem, so it’s good to see some of the larger players begin to make the change.” Link.
Flickr member Chainbreaker writes: “I found these old magazines last week at the flea market and thought that the graphics on the covers were great. Some of the articles are interesting but I really enjoy looking through the advertisements and classifieds.” I also really enjoy these old magazines; it’s pretty amazing what people used to make and build. I usually show these at conferences when I talk about about DIY culture and MAKE history. [via] Link.href=”http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/09/flickr_set_of_beauti.html”>via] Link.
New SLR! Saturday, January 21, from 6 – 8 PM in LA. “This exhibition will feature the newest addition to the SRL machine family- the Sneaky Soldiers- near life sized, remote controlled army of revolutionaries. Also included in the exhibition will be large-scale documentary images, and the premier of the video from SRL’s recent show in Downtown Los Angeles. This video features the first invasion of the Sneaky Soldiers. The SRL commentary on the art of war debued a Sneaky Soldier emerging from an 18-foot tall wooden Trojan horse to face danger from large-scale destructive robots enduring the pain of flame and damage through a hail of sparks and projectiles.” [via] Link.
We spent some time with the new Intel-based Macbook. Wow–it’s super fast. As we take photos, we’re automatically uploading them to Flickr via WiFi-Kodak wireless camera and the roaming EVDO Wifi network we’re broadcasting — so here they are, some of the first photos with hot system info action, too! Link.
Derek writes “The gumbrix came about because so many of my robot projects required the kind of rapid prototyping that Lego really excels at, yet required more in the way of control electronics than Lego was capable of. With a maximum of 3 motors and 3 sensors, the Mindstorms kit was not really capable of the more complicated control strategies that I was interested in.” [via] Link.
Chad writes “For a while I have wanted to control things with a serial port. It was pretty easy to control a relay with a serial port. With a standard serial port you can control 2 relays. (with a parallel port you can control 8 relays, but I don’t have a parallel port on my system). A standard PC serial port has 9 pins. Pin 4 – DTR (data terminal ready) and Pin 7 – RTS (request to send) can be used to control a relay. These two ports don’t actually send data. They are used to signal the other device to tell it when to send data.” Here’s the HOW TO – Link.
“BFO (beat frequency oscillator) metal detectors use two oscillators, each of which produces a radio frequency. One of these oscillators uses a coil of wire that we call the search loop. The second oscillator uses a much smaller coil of wire, and is usually inside the control box and is called the reference oscillator. By adjusting the oscillators so their frequencies are very nearly the same, the difference between them is made audible as a beat note, this beat note changes slightly when the search loop is moved over or near to a piece of metal.” Link.
