Boy Builds Robot That Obeys His Voice
From Popular Science, 1931 (Via Mostly Forbidden Zone)
Technology
Skill Builder: Hexbug Hacking
In response to our Robotics theme on the site, several parents have written me to ask about entry-level robotics projects for little kids, and what’s the appropriate age of entry. Of course, the latter part of that is hard to answer. It depends very much on the child. The obvious entry point is Lego Mindstorms. But in thinking of other product lines or building sets that can scale well with age and growing technical sophistication, the Hexbug line came to mind.
In the Maker Shed: Music Shield
Give your project some beat with the Seeed Music Shield from the Maker Shed. The Seeed Music Shield is an Arduino compatible music player / recorder that is also Ipod / Iphone compatible. It is based on VS1053b chip so can play variety of music formats stored on MicroSD card.
Cool Modular Earbuds Concept
This IRONBUDS kickstarter from New Hampshirite Thomas Young is already funded, but it looks like you can still jump on board if you want a set for yourself.
Ready-to-Wear Android Wearable Platform
The WIMM Wearable Platform from WIMM Labs is a 1-inch square Android-powered module packed with 160×160 pixels of transflective display, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, Accelerometer, magnetometer, vibrator, speaker, and up to 32GB of microSD storage. Its 667 MHz processor means that it can operate independent of a secondary paired device and is positioned as a “first screen” device, similar to the iPod Nano, LiveView, inPulse, and Metawatch.
Skill Builder: Build a Wobbler
In the latest issue of MAKE, Volume 27, the always-awesome Howtoons project column shows you how to build a wobbly little walker using two servomotors and some plastic coat hanger hooks for eccentric wheegs. While this is not really a robot, it’s a fun project for teaching kids some bot basics, like the important robot-building technique of hacking servos for continuous rotation and using Tupperware as a bot body (very handy).
Meet the Makers from MAKE Volume 27: Roboticist DJ Sures
DJ Sures Is a roboticist living in Calgary, Alberta. He is the designer of the EZ-B Robot Controller, which converts toys into interactive robots. In MAKE Volume 27, DJ wrote an introduction to the EZ-B Robot Controller and explained how to use it to make a Ball Chasing Digger Robot.