Something I want to learn to do…

Spanish students beat NASA

Spanish students beat NASA

A group of student makers took kite arial photography to a new level: weather balloon photography. They certainly are undercutting NASA’s budget, spending very little on their project, and fabricating most of the structure and electronics themselves. Check out Gareth’s previous entry on the project. Mail Online has a decent writeup. Nice of them to […]

Make your own radio programming

Make your own radio programming

[Photo from MetroMode] Michael Jackson’s death caused radio’s roboprogrammers to take a back seat for a while. Increasingly, over the past few decades, broadcast radio has ceased to be a local affair. As the FCC regulations on local ownership of media outlets has faded towards corporate behemoths, radio programming more and more these days is […]

AIDG: water solutions

AIDG: water solutions

AIDG is a NonGovernmental Organization (NGO) that helps provide low technology solutions to help address environmental and health needs to people living in communities without great access to the systems that many of us consider requirements. Here are a few of their water-based initiatives: Solar Hot Water: XelaTeco, with support from AIDG’s wonderful interns, recently […]

Wearable metadata

Wearable metadata

Patty Maes of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab introduces what may be the must have gadget in the not so far future. The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector […]

Well-documented robotic snake

Well-documented robotic snake

This is a great example of a well documented group project. Their wiki has loads of information. There is sample code, parts lists, descriptions of the circuits, explanation of the components. Photo from Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems The robotic snake consists of a head segment and several body segments. The head segment houses the […]

Creepy crawler

via miters This looks like fun. Nice project. University of Louisiana News has a decent interview with Dr. Terrence Chambers, and student Don Tamosaitis. The design draws on the work of Theo Jansen. The crawler travels about 2-3 miles/hour. There were five of us working on it, there was a lot of 3D modeling of […]