Anybody interested in building their own robot, sending spacecraft to the moon, or launching inter-continental ballistic missiles should have at least some basic filter options in their toolkit, otherwise the robot will likely wobble about erratically and the missile will miss it’s target. What is a filter anyway? In practical terms, the filter should smooth […]
When building robots, or indeed other complex mechanical systems, it’s often the case that more and more limit switches, light gates and sensors are amassed as the project evolves. Each addition brings more IO pin usage, cost, potentially new interfacing requirements and accompanying microcontrollers or ADCs. If you don’t have much electronics experience, that’s not […]
Making an outdoor rover is easy stuff, with lots of folk having them doing their roving activities on beaches and alien worlds. Clearly the new frontier is indoor environments, a frontier which is helpfully being conquered by [Andreas Hoelldorfer]’s Mantis Rover. OK, we’re kidding. This project started out life as a base for [Andreas]’s exquisite […]
There’s something fascinating about humanoid robotic hands, if only because of how they are such close approximations of our own hands. One could almost picture them with tendons and skin covering them. Sadly, making your own is quite prohibitive because in addition to being complex bits of machinery, making one of these marvels of engineering […]
As hackers approached the dramatic stone entrance of Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Arts, a group of acolytes belonging to The Church of Robotron beckoned them over, inviting them to attempt to earn the title of Mutant Saviour. The church uses hazardous environments, religious indoctrination, a 1980s arcade game and some seriously funny low tech […]
With the wide array of digital entertainment that’s available to young students, it can be difficult for educators to capture their imagination. In decades past, a “volcano” made with baking soda and vinegar would’ve been enough to put a class of 5th graders on the edge of their seats, but those projects don’t pack quite […]
Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the AI at the Edge Hack Chat with John Welsh from NVIDIA! Machine learning was once the business of big iron like IBM’s Watson or the nearly limitless computing power of the cloud. But the power in AI is moving away from data centers to the edge, […]
In the era of social media, events such as the fire at Notre Dame cathedral are experienced by a global audience in real-time. From New York to Tokyo, millions of people were glued to their smartphones and computers, waiting for the latest update from media outlets and even individuals who were on the ground documenting […]
Whether it comes to rescuing people from a cave system or the underground maze of sewers, tunnels and the like that exist underneath any major city, having accurate maps of the area is always crucial to know what the optimal routes are, and what the expected dangers are. The same is true for combat situations, […]
Knowing in what absolute direction your robot is pointed can be crucial, and expensive systems like those used by NASA on Mars are capable of calculating this six-dimensional heading vector to within around one degree RMS, but they are fairly expensive. If you want similar accuracy on a hacker budget, this paper shows you how […]