If you can’t get enough of DIY R2-D2 building, here’s another from Italy– … taller (1.5 mt) but walks (with 2 or 3 legs) and beeps like the original, and flees from people holding light sabres! Oh, and comes with bluetooth and usb…The robot actually is the resulting prototype of a research project in creating a kind of slave or companion robot with a friendly interface. Link.
Today Nintendo announced their super tiny 4 inches wide, 2 inches tall and 0.7 inches deep Game Boy Micro. While it’s not functionally different than the Game Boy SP, it’s a lot smaller and perhaps cheaper. I really like the Game Boy SP / Advance as a hackable platform, in issue 02 of MAKE (shipping now) we have an article about using GB’s as photo viewers, ebook readers, music players and home-brew code devices, the new micro will do all this and more- smaller. We like that. Link.
DIY-ish wrist real estate. Made of sterling silver and real beer or soda cans (personally emptied by desiger, Dana Roth) these cuffs take beer lover to a whole new level. They’re made in Portland, Oregon… Not to be outdone here are some photo bracelets also on desgn*sponge.
Mashing up Google maps and Gasbuddy = locations of cheap gas in your area on a Google map (map or satellite view). Just choose a city- then the data on the right side is updated cheapest gas prices. If you have mobile high speed access you could add a GPS and have this running while you drive. In the future, maybe our cars will do this for us. Via Robotwisdom. Link.
Over on BoingBoing there’s a post about the new Dave Mattews CD that tries to install weird stuff when inserted, crashes and all sorts of things when used on a Windows based PC. I don’t have the CD but it sounds like MediaMax from SunnComm (SunnComm tried to sue a student awhile back). The simple solution is to hold the Shift key when you pop the CD in or disable Autorun (a good idea in general) here’s how.
IBM has a cool series of articles where they build an embedded application using a Mac Mini. The application itself is the classic photo booth: you pay a bit of money, a flashbulb goes off, and a minute later you’ve got some pictures of yourself, or perhaps yourselves if you’re out with a friend. More recent versions of this booth create more complicated pictures, adding additional features, such as overlays, or possibly adding video to the mix. The test application starts as a a fairly simplistic form of the photo booth application, with room for further development. By the end of this series, you’ll be accepting money and printing pictures. Link.
Last week or so we mentioned there was something happening over on WhiteBox Robotics and now they’ve announced their new Model 914 PC-BOT for pre-order. The PC-BOTs come in a couple flavors, and you’ll need to add your own PC, but they’ve taken care of the hard parts- locomotion, motors, power, sensors, etc… for $1,200 or so it’s not exactly cheap, but once you add up all the components and software it’s not bad (the under $2k home robot is finally here). Link.
