Category: Robots

LEGO Mindstorms NXT, now with killer lasers! Okay, so they’re relatively harmless lasers, but this step-by-step hack shows you how to turn the stock NXT Light Sensor Module into a Laser Module. Cool!

[Via /.]

When I became interested in BEAM robotics and started taking apart pagers to cannibalize their motors, I was fascinated by the offset-weight on the motor shaft. That’s what makes your pager or other comm device vibrate, a one-sided weight spinning around and causing the vibrations you feel. While these weights are usually removed in miniature bot building, I started thinking about how you could use this off-kilter rumbling as a form of motility. Later, I discovered there’s a whole branch on the BEAM family tree for these “Vibrobots.”

Zach Debord, who created the Twin Engine Solarroller has built some cool Vibrobots. I’m going to talk to him about another Street Tech piece that shows off some of these and describes how he built ’em.

Which brings us to this amazing, analog vibrobot drawing robot project, built with little more than a paper cup, three felt pens, a battery pack and a DC toy motor with an “eccentric weight.” The video of the builder’s son taking it for a spin is adorable.

[Via Make]

Here’s a clip from a 1983 documentary film on Survival Research Labs, filmed in the style of a 1950s science education film.

[Editor’s Note: No joy in embedding the YouTube vid here, so I just linked to it.]

The subhead reads: “Manoi AT01 kit contains 200 tiny screws and a 100-page manual.” The level of your hardware hacking/building geekitude could perhaps be measured by your reaction to that line. If 200 screws and a thick manual make you wanna hide your head and call out for your mamma, robot building is probably not for you. If such implied complexity and miniature parts fiddling makes you go all weak in the knee, you’ve come to the right hobby. Unfortunately, short of building junkbots, it’s not a hobby that comes cheap. The Manoi AT01 kit will set you back US$1260 or the Yen equivalent for your nerdy analog in Japan. So far, the maker has not announced plans to sell the 13″ robot overseas.

See our previous item on the Manoi robots.

Linux Journal has an article, written by a high school teacher, on the bots built in his class. The current bot runs on Gentoo Linux and has some clever features, such as wheel encoding using computer mice. Now using parts from mice to build bots is nothing new, even using them to create encoders has been done, but this design bolts a largely-intact optical mouse to a drive wheel — it even uses the freakin’ mousepad as the encoder wheel!

I also like the parking sign seen in the background of one of the pics: Linux User Parking Only.

Thanks, Alberto!

Okay, the title lies. It’s not really a robot (and it’s not only built with a hanger), it’s a little one-motor walking machine (no sensors, no feedback), but the project does teach you about basic breadboarding, soldering, use of the BEAM Bicore control circuit, how to hack a servo motor, and other deep geek mojo you can apply to building actual bots.

This is a version of the project that was in my book, Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots, and pictured in Make Vol. 6 and on the issue’s Web page. The illustrations were done by Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder and the photos are by Street Tech’s court photographer Jay Townsend.

The Fall issue of the most excellent Robot Magazine is on newstands now. Among other juicy fare, it has a cover story on the Microsoft Robotics Studio and a closer look at the NXT Mindstorms system. On the mag’s website, they also have a preview of an upcoming feature piece for the Winter issue on the amazing MANOI Humanoid Robots (which look like they were beamed straight out of a Japanese anime). The Web piece has lots of photos of the two main MANOI models (pictured above), bot innards, and a hi-res exploded schematic. Also: Tom Atwood, Editor-in-Chief of Robot, was recently on the Daedalus Howell Radio Show. You can access an MP3 of it here.

From the Make blog:
Roomba adds a new workshop bot to their line up, last week they announced a pet version too… – “The same size and shape as the iRobot Roomba® Vacuuming Robot, iRobot Dirt Dog features an oversized, bagless debris bin that is approximately 40 percent larger than Roomba’s bin. The robot also features two counter-rotating bristle brushes that spin at nearly 1,000 rotations per minute to pick up heavy debris such as nails, wood chips and small shop scraps. With brushes specially designed to sweep up dirt that clings to rough surfaces, the robot is recommended for use on hard floors, shop carpets and industrial surfaces only.” The price is expected to be extremely reasonable US$130.

Does Bender know about this? Those engineers over at NEC, always looking for a way to keep their perpetual R&D darling, the PaPeRo, in the limelight, have now tasked the hapless little Weeble with wine-tasting. Seriously. Hot on the heels of PaPeRo being turned into a health advisor and cheese snob (it can analyze food and determine its fat and sugar content and identify different types of cheeses), it can now perform a similar hat trick on wines. It does this using the same tech it used on food: infrared spectral analysis, measuring the degree of light absorption in different wavelengths and comparing that to its database. But it’s harder to do this with wine than with food, as the absorption signatures are similar to each other. Okay. Cool. Interesting. But what does this have to do with a small personal home robot that you’ve been promising consumers for almost six years now?

[Via Gizmag]

In a recent talk at a conference, game designer Will Wright joked that he now has a robot to watch and record his TV for him (TiVo). Maybe he’ll want one of these next, a robot that can ride a bike for you. Who needs all that calorie-burning exercise and exposure to harsh direct overhead lighting, anyway? Make the robot do it. And hey, Tom Servo, while you’re out, could you grab me a pack o’ smokes?