Iron Man 2

I. can. not. wait.

Old School Robotics

When I was growing up, I was destined to be an engineer.  I would go to the library and check out every book I could on robots - big picture books of robots, children's books on robots, even some academic books that I couldn't really understand as a child, but the diagrams and illustrations captivated me.  I was enchanted by the idea of building my own machine. 
Make has a short article on one of my favorites, and I'm now destined to spend the rest of my evening perusing the Old Robots website.

M3: Neony & Synchy

Baby Robots!

I'm 100% certain these will grow up to kill us all.

USB Oscilloscope on the cheap

Build your own tools!
This ATiny45-based dual channel oscilloscope is home-made, cheap and simple.  It doesn't capture at high sample rates, but it's neat nonetheless.

Design, source code and interface code available here.

Towards Smart Dust

A 9-cubic millimeter solar-powered sensor system developed at the University of Michigan is the smallest that can harvest energy from its surroundings to operate nearly perpetually. The U-M system’s processor, solar cells, and battery are all contained in its tiny frame, which measures 2.5 by 3.5 by 1 millimeters. It is 1,000 times smaller than comparable commercial counterparts.

RBT173 - Larsen Scanner

Here is a short video of some of my freshman students completed lab assignments.



This is an early laboratory assignment in a freshman-level course. The assignment takes the place of the typical "Hello World" blinking light program for micro-controllers. The course is RBT173: Introduction to Microcontrollers. We're using hand-built Arduino-compatible micro-controller boards and exploring all of their ins and outs with a series of weekly hardware / software labs culminating in the construction of a small mobile robot based on the board.

For more information, visit www.uat.edu/robotics .

Gaagle Bot Indexes Your Home

A roomba-based manifestation of the Google search crawler.





Check it out with hardware details and source code at www.gaaglebot.com.

Kohctpyktop: A logic design challenge

Feeling nostalgic for those frantic days in the digital design lab? Wish there were perhaps a game that put you in the place of an engineer, trying to design new ICs to meet the goals of some unspecified organization? Want to get your SI on? No idea what I am talking about?
Well then, let me introduce you to Kohctpyktop: engineer of the people, by Zachtronics Industries. It's the first game I've ever seen where you have to design integrated circuits as a challenge, sort of like pipe dream for electrical engineers.

Kohctpyktop via Make

OK GO - This too shall pass

Rocks my socks.

Expressive Telepresence with MIT's MeBot

A totally sweet little robot from Sigurdur Orn Adalgeirsson at MIT.