Category: Robots

What would you get if you crossed the DIY spirit of MAKE and its sister pub CRAFT, the power and digital sophistication of LEGO Mindstorms, and the childhood charm of macaroni and yarn art? You may get something like PicoCricket. Like its nerdier big brother, Mindstorms, PicoCricket grew out of a collaboration between the LEGO company and MIT’s Media Lab, and both building sets include electronics and a microcontroller, but PicoCricket is designed to appeal to a wider range of young builders, and to allow for much more diverse creations. To assist in this, along with the electronics, LEGO pieces, and the computer “brain,” the kit also contains more traditional kid crafting materials, right down to the pipe cleaners, glittery bits, and googley eyes.

The PicoCricket is not actually made by LEGO, although it contains LEGO components. LEGO partially funded the Toronto start-up, Playful Invention Company (PICO), that developed the kit and it provides the LEGO pieces under an agreement with PICO.

Read the entire piece about the PicoCricket at BusinessWeek.
Visit MIT’s Cricket site.
And PICO’s site.

Here at Street Tech Labs, we’re big believers in the technojunk box, a collection of cast-off consumer electronics to have on hand for delving into when you need parts for robot building or other hardware hacks. We’re also big fans of junkbots, robots built out of as many recycled parts as possible. But this builder, David Williamson, definitely puts the “junk” in technojunk. He builds these amazing rattletrap creations from old motors, gears, switches, relays, and transistors, i.e. the usual suspects, but he also makes judicious use of drinking straws, soda cans, paper plates, cardboard, plastic beads, toy pieces, string, coat hangers, coffee cup lids, bits of pocket lint, fairy dust, and dreams.

After marveling at his wonderful drawing contraptions, check out the rest of his site. It’s a treasure-trove of freeform creativity and technojunk jazz. This cat definitely has the chops.

[Via Make]

I spent the weekend inhaling brain-dimming fumes and wielding dangerous power tools, all in the service of science and the advancement of robot-kind. Cause as a wise philosopher once said (or was it a HAL 9000?): “Isn’t a human just a way for a robot to make another robot?” See the bot this puny human bodged up in my debrief on the Solarbotics Turbot Kit, in our Reviews section.

I recently became aware of a BEAM builder named Zach DeBord who had a number of his creations on Flickr. I decided to pick his brain on one of his creations — a two engine, four storage cap, 2 solarengine circuit “Solarroller” — for a Street Tech DIY feature.

If you built tmy beginner solarroller from the cover story in MAKE Vol. 6, this could be a perfect follow-up project. This uses a variation of the solarengine (SE).circuit. This variation’s called a FLED SE because it uses a Flashing LED as its voltage trigger. Confused? Read on, the piece explains how this works…

Not to take anything away from our friends over at Nxtbot.com, but there a couple of other cool new blogs dedicated to the just-released LEGO Mindstorms NXT system that you might want to add to your feeds if you’re a LEGO bot enthusiast.

Nxtasy (we won’t make any snarky comments about their name) has a look and feel, and content, similar to Nxtbot. They seem to be more focused on the nuts and bolts of Mindstorms and less on the field of hobby robotics and R&D in general. They have projects, complete with code, building instructions, and videos of bot demos and vid news items about Mindstorms.

The Mindstorms NXT Review has similar content to both Nxtbot and Nxtasy, with a design that makes it kind of hard to read. Not sure yet whether this one is worth regular visits or not. Of all three blogs, Nxtasy seems to have the most frequent updates and the juciest content, and their content is all-LEGO, while Nxtbot covers all types of bots.

Mindstorms Easter Egg Bonus: There’s a hidden video, an NXT commercial, on the front page of the official Mindstorms site. Click on the word “do!” at the end of the “What is NXT?” section. It’ll take you to the vid of their mascot bot (that Johnny5 wannabe) playing soccer. It’s not the real bot, it’s an animation and he’s doing things no NXT could ever do, which is kind of ironic ’cause it’s hidden behind the words “can do.” [Via Mindstorms NXT Review]

While doing research for an article, I bumped into this incredible BEAM robot project. The builder, Bruce Robinson, wanted to know how complex a behavior set he could get from a robot using only BEAM technology (i.e. analog electronics and no microcontroller). The result, Hider, has nine sensor systems! Robinson writes:

“Hider is concerned with survival. Normally it parks itself in bright light where it is easily seen. If the light gets dim, it looks for a brighter place. In the dark it stays still and flashes a beacon every few seconds so it won’t get stepped on. And if it hears a loud noise, such as a door slamming or people talking, it “runs away” and looks for a dark place to hide in.

“While Hider performs more or less as intended, there have been a few surprises. For example, in the photo (below) Hider is “looking” at the darkest thing in a sunlit room — a wooden column. While we might think of a shadow as being darker, Hider doesn’t see it that way; its “eyes” look at the walls, not the floor. In a room with white walls and pale furniture, a nearby column of reddish coloured wood looks very dark.”

Robinson has exhaustive details on Hider’s design, logic, schematics for all the circuits, pictures of the construction, and lots of other info. The schematics are gorgeous, a model for how this sort of thing should be done.

One of the things that’s always frustrated me about BEAM is that, with the exception of Mark Tilden’s work at Wow Wee, few people seem to be experimenting with/applying BEAM principles in building complex (or relatively complex) analog control systems. This is one of the better, and better documented, projects I’ve seen.

I just love the look of this laser-cut plastic body that Chris Myers, a product designer, built for his Palm Pilot Robot. The pieces are cut from 1/8″ plexi and the layers stack in such a way that glue or fasteners are not needed. Graphite was the design program used.

While you’re on the site, check out some of his other projects, such as the bots built in a class that he teaches. It shows off a number of cool critters, including a variation on Mousey the Junkbot, with two bump whiskers.

Our buds at Nxtbot have a piece about a new Japanese robot called PLEN. Under 10 inches tall, PLEN has 18 joints, can be operated via Bluetooth and mobile phones, and runs for about 25 minutes on a charge. But the amazing thing is that PLEN rollerskates and skateboards!

Check out this YouTube vid, where PLEN shows off some slick moves on a skateboard and some of his rollerskating routine. Nice form. He’s no Brian Boitano, but still…

On his hardware hacking blog, Tod Kurt of TodBot has instructions on how to build a USB-to-serial (mini-DIN 8) cable for connecting a Roomba to a laptop (or other computer). As Tod points out in the piece, the PL2303 USB-to-serial adapter chip, built into the cable you use (the Nokia USB data cable), has support for all the major OSes.

[Via Make]

CNet News has a nice photo gallery with deep captions round-up of events at this week’s jointly held 2006 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, which is taking place this week in Boston.

The caption for this image reads:

“Woofie” is used to teach speech and language impaired preschoolers in New Orleans vocabulary, sequence and memory skills. Woofie makes an animal noise, says the name of the animal, and then asks children to step on the corresponding square. The robot dog responds positively when the answer is correct, and continues the game, adding an additional animal to the list upon each turn.