It started when [Mitxela] was faced with about a hundred incorrectly-placed 0603 parts. Given that he already owned two TS101 soldering irons, a 3D printer, and knows how to use FreeCAD (he had just finished designing a custom TS101 holder) it didn’t take long to create cost-effective DIY soldering tweezers. Two screws allow adjusting the […]
Earlier this year, I bought one of those K40-style laser machines that was listed at a ridiculously low price, and it arrived broken. Well, let me qualify that: the laser tube and the power supply work perfectly, but that’s about the best you can say about it. On first power-up, it made a horrible noise, […]
Most robots depend on controlled environments, because the real world is hard to get around in. The smaller the robot, the bigger this problem because little wheels (or legs) can take only little steps. One way around that is MIT’s latest one-legged hopping robot, which sports a set of four insect-like wings on its top […]
Sound hardware has been built into PC motherboards for so long now it’s difficult to remember the days when a sound card was an expensive add-on peripheral. By the mid to late 1990s they were affordable and ubiquitous enough to be everywhere, but three decades later some of them are starting to fail. [Necroware] takes […]
One of the delights in Bash, zsh, or whichever shell tickles your fancy in your OSS distribution of choice, is the ease of which you can use scripts. These can be shell scripts, or use the Perl, Python or another interpreter, as defined by the shebang (#!) at the beginning of the script. This signature […]
Human biology is very much like that of other mammals, and yet so very different in areas where it matters. One of these being human neurology, with aspects like the human brain and the somatosensory pathways (i.e. touch etc.) being not only hard to study in non-human animal analogs, but also (genetically) different enough that […]
Over on the Google blog [Joel Meares] explains how Google built the new family of Gemini Robotics models. The bi-arm ALOHA robot equipped with Gemini 2.0 software can take general instructions and then respond dynamically to its environment as it carries out its tasks. This family of robots aims to be highly dexterous, interactive, and […]
There are some ideas which someone somewhere has to try. Take [Uri Tuchman]’s foot mouse. It’s a computer mouse for foot operation, but it’s not just a functional block. Instead it’s an ornate inlaid-wood-and-brass affair in the style of a very fancy piece of antique footwear. The innards of an ordinary USB mouse are placed […]