Mark Tilden, BEAMbot guru, who now works for Wowwee Toys in Hong Kong, has a new robot toy that should be on store shelves for the holidays. Called the Robosapien, this is the first walking humanoid design that Tilden’s done (as far as we know). One would assume it’s based on some of the same BEAM-like principles that Tilden used in his other Wowwee toys, such as the B.I.O.-Bugs and the Beastland Dragons. Solarbotics has a gallery of progress images and some motion studies of the Robosapien.
Servo Magazine
The venerable magazine of record for wireheads and hardware hackers everywhere, Nuts & Volts, is about to launch a new mag called Servo, dedicated to robotics. Nuts & Volts has always had strong coverage of robotics and embedded systems, and has done magazine supplements on amateur robotics, so given their beat and the growing popularity of all things bot, this spin-off mag is a natural. The first issue is due on newstands next month. If you sign up as a charter subscriber, you get three issues free. Hopefully, Nuts & Volts can succeed where others, like Robot Science and Technology, have failed. Sure seems like the time is right for such a publication.
New Robot Website on Street Tech
There’s also a small companion website for my book at www.streettech.com/robotbook. This site includes larger project images, information not available in the book, bug fixes on the projects, reader hardware hacks, robot news, and will eventually include downloadable versions of the "Heroes of the Robolution" trading cards that Mark and I did.
After you’ve read through the projects in the book, you’ll definitely want to read the online project notes before actually starting to build the bots.
My book is OUT!!!
I just discovered that my book is now listed on Amazon as being available. It jumped from a sales rank last night of 2,317,260 to a current rank of 1,921,760 and it says there are only three copies left (with more coming). Of course, they may have only started with five, who knows.
Hey you, order my damn book so I can obsessively watch the sales rank change!
My Robot Book is Coming Soon!
My latest book, the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots, should be shipping in a week or so. Part of Que’s best selling Absolute Beginner’s Guide series, my book leads the newbie into the fascinating world of robots and do-it-yourself bot building.
The book contains projects that detail how to build three cool robots out of a coat hanger, a trashed computer mouse, and those AOL CDs that seem to breed on your desktop. I’m not kidding. Junkbots R Us.
Ilustrations for the book were done by bOING bOING’s amazing Mark Frauenfelder, with photos by Street Tech’s very own Jay Townsend.
Pre-order the book on Amazon.
Record streaming audio on your HD with freeware
Opcode: Direct 2 Disk. And it’s free.
The Tivo Killer?
Matt Haughey writes a review of Snapstream software, and says it compares favorably with his Tivo.
And Haughey is fairly fanatical about his Tivo.
Pixelvision
A great little documentary on Fisher-Price’s now legendary Pixelvision.
personal data transmitters
p.d.ts have been in use since approx 1980. origanlly they were installed in tooth molars but as the tech became smaller they are put into any tooth. with the p.d.t. the brain literally becomes a reciever/transmitter. approx 20 million people have dentaly wired to date. behind the scenes this is known as a silent epidemic. i’m looking for people to help make this situation newsworthy. i have proof.
[webmaster note: Doug is not a regular contributor to Street Tech, but I couldn’t help approving this post. Oh yes, Doug, we’d LOVE to see your proof! Go ahead and post it in the comments!]
Superhero, Take 2? – Student saves peers from PeopleSoft!
I thought I’d post this story I discovered today because it is an interesting tale of big corporate and institutional failure, and how a 1st year student saved himself and his fellow students a whole lot of time with a little skill and imagination.
To make a long story short, It seems the system the Univerisity of Alberta had paid big coin to manage its students (allegedly and tellingly hacked together from an inventory control system) was a mess, and the U was planning to ditch paper altogether, dooming people to hours of pointing, clicking and swearing.
So, one enterprising student decided that something had to be done, and he was the guy to do it. His first cut took 5 days and was already a big help at that point. He was initially hosting it on his own tab, but now the Student Union handles that, though the University still can’t take a helpful position due to contractual requirements. For some more details the student union discussion board is interesting reading.
I could take the position that we’re all doomed by megacorporate control of computing (and I usually do), but this time, I’m just plain tickled to see one guy do a good job with what he had before him and help everyone in the process.
(if you can’t get the first link, sorry – the show was not yet posted when I wrote this so I had to make an educated guess)