Category: Robots

Okay my solder-happy wireheads, I’ve written a full review of Solarbotics’ new Herbie the Mousebot kit. Here’s a pic of my actual Herbie, on the bench and ready to zoom off into the hinterlands of the living/dining room. Go, Herbie, go!

My latest review for the FM Holiday Guide is up. I reviewed Herbie the Mousebot, the new kit from Solarbotics. I built it this weekend. Fun! I’ll have a more in-depth review here on Street Tech later today.

We just got the Street Tech invite to a WowWee meet n’ greet for CES next month and are bummed we won’t be there to see the new bots. The invite features enticing silhouettes of the new bots, and this is apparently one of them, an R/C dragonfly that actually stays aloft on beating wings!

With the defense department spending the big bucks in R&D into this kind of hovering spybot, it’s amazing that a toy company has something this “advanced” (he says in quotes because, while it is amazing for a first effort, it’s still not what you’d call hummingbird-graceful — stealth tech she ain’t). Can’t wait to see the other WowWee offerings.

[Via Engadget]

Call me a sick so and so, but I got a big kick out of this Teddy Bear surgery vid in which a Teddy gets de-stuffed and then used to skin a Version 1 Robosapien. Hey, other tech has “skins,” maybe WowWee should look into skins for their robots. The video ends with the obligatory kitty harassment. All in good fun. Okay, so maybe the skinned Tedster pre-‘Sapien explantation is a little creepy…

Khalid Hosein, one of the editors at RoboCommunity, a site dedicated to WowWee robotics, sent me a link in response to my posting on the RSMedia Robot. On the site, I found an interesting YouTube vid of the lovably eccentric Mark Tilden. My favorite part is when he starts telling the female interviewer about his PissBot, a bathroom bot that cleans up misses around the bowl. Hey, I’ll take one of those.

While doing research for my Robosapien V2 review for the Federated Gadget Guide, I discovered that Robosapien Media (or RS Media as he’s called), or V3, I guess you could call him, is already being released in some parts of the world (Germany, the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). I guess he’s not going to make it to US shores by this Christmas. That’s a shame. Same thing happened last year with the V2 as I recall. But you can see the demos and specs on the RSMediaOnline site and see some beloved bot deconstructing already going on by early buyers via this Aussie forum.

My entry today in the Federated Media Holiday Gadget Guide is on the Robosapien V2. Here’s a snippy-snip:

“Probably the most enthusiastic recipient of the Robosapien V2 would be the robot builder/hardware hacker, either teen or adult, who’d be anxious for the visiting holiday relatives to leave so that he or she could whip out the Dremel tool and soldering iron and get busy “improving” Robosapien. WowWee’s robot designer, well-known robotics engineer Mark Tilden, encourages aftermarket modding, and designs his toys with well-labeled circuit boards, plug-in connectors, and plenty of space inside for user-added tech…”

Read the rest of the piece here.

Tod E. Kurt, author of the new book Hacking Roomba (which looks great, BTW) has an article on the book’s support site on how to add a Cylon-esque LED light array to your Roomba. The video at the end of the piece is cute.

Our pals over at Solarbotics have just announced an awesome new robot kit, Herbie the Mousebot (US$40). The kit uses the Herbie circuit, first developed by Randy Sargent at MIT, and used in several modded versions, including my “Mousey the Junkbot” project from my robot book and MAKE Vol. 2.

This kit looks really cool, adding a mouse-like PCB body that will tickle kids and terrify the housepets. The traditional Herbie circuit has also been modded to include two tactile whiskers in the front and a touch-sensitive tail so that it can work its way out of tight spots.

A portion of sales of Herbie will be donated to the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, an org that Randy Sargent is involved with, which uses robotics to get kids excited about science, technology, engineering and math.

This kit would make the perfect gift for a kid, or anyone, who’s interested in electronics and robotics, but maybe not confident enough to build a similar project from separate components. Solarbotics is taking pre-orders now and will ship kits out on November 24th.

I love some of the art that people are making with bots. This one, called Coke Is It, finds a hexapod walker traipsing around a gallery sucking up puddles of Coca-Cola that it finds on the floor. It then sprays the corrosive sugar-water all over itself. Over time, the Coke eats through the “skin” of the various components and into its sensitive circuitry, and then it’s lights out for little Johnny-5, or in this case, C3 (a reference to C2, Coke’s new low-carb can of caramel sugar-water).

This slow-mo destruction of circuitry through liquid reminds me of one of the more amazing stories from WWII. Legend has it that Polish slave labor, put to work by the Nazis at Peenemünde to build V-2 rockets, would pee on the control electronics they were working on when their guards weren’t looking. By the time the rockets had been assembled and sent to the launch pads, the urine had corroded the innards and many of the rockets malfunctioned. I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story or not, but this kind of ingenuity (and bravery and selflessness) is always inspiring.

[Via we-make-money-not-art]