Making a robot can be an incredibly rewarding experience. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, engineering and problem solving. However, if you’re just getting started in robotics, it can also be overwhelming. To make things easier for those who are just starting out, we’ve put together some tips and tricks to help makers bring robots to life! From the basics of assembling your robot to software implementation, these pointers will give you everything you need to get started on your robotic adventure!
A group of UPenn Engineering students have taken several quadrotors and turned them into robotic musicians. We’ve seen the great swarming abilities of these machines recently, but now using various instruments and noisemakers, these aerial drones manage to plunk out a fairly convincing version of the “James Bond” theme.
My post last Friday (Making Money with Drone-Based Businesses) was long on enthusiasm and short on facts. Thanks, as always, to our fantastic commentariat for helping me get up to speed. The story of drone entrepreneurship is, in fact, emerging, but the technology and the willing entrepreneurs are mostly in place, already, and the action, for now, is about the law and how it’s changing.
Fourteen-year-old Lego hacker Leon Overweel built this impressive Lego Mindstorms NXT printer, AKA PriNXT. PriNXT has three motors: two control the X and Y motion, and the third lifts the pen. The first motor, the one in the middle, is very straight forward – it has two long axes coming out of it that connect […]
MAKE blog fixture Michal Zalewski is working on an omnibot that uses a single motor to control the angles of four wheels, allowing it to make sharp turns without the necessity of using mechanum gears. Of course, this being Michal, his whole project is gorgeously CNCed and cast from resin. The goal of this project […]
Ziwon Wang’s work explores the relationship between human and machine. His works are eerily familiar (uncanny valley, anyone?) and mechanized, with movement apparatuses exposed.
The emerging story of entrepreneurs using drones to provide marketable services is fascinating to me. Small businesses have been making money by making drones themselves for quite awhile, now, but I’m just now starting to see start-ups using drones to sell services. Aerial photography is maybe the most obvious opportunity—surveying real estate, covering sporting or […]
Ezer Lichtenstein of ITP made an autonomous blimp called the Robot Tourist that can sense its surroundings and take photos of the landscape it flies over. This was accomplished using a Link Sprite camera, a microSD Arduino shield, and an Arduino Uno.
