Robot is Happy » Other People’s Robots

Robotic Curtain – Not necessarily effective, but definitely awesome.

Christopher Hazlett — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:29:13 +0000

Niklas Roy created a curtain to shield his projects from curious onlookers...only to garner more curiosity. And the video ain't too bad either. Enjoy.

Check it out.

Sign Language Translator

Christopher Hazlett — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:53:17 +0000

Awesome use of the Arduino Mega and other various sensors. Consider me awestruck.

Translation from one language to another is often like swapping variable values; you need something in the middle. That’s why translators were invented, but the opportunity for them to interject obscene comments made communication between people of different languages uneasy. And since my understanding of other languages is a bit rusty, and my group needed a project with a biomedical bent, we decided to translate from American English to American Sign Language. That’s right, you should be really excited right now.

Check it Out

Evil Mad Scientist Disects the Venerable Nixie Tube

Christopher Hazlett — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 14:12:23 +0000

Evil Mad Scientist dissected a Nixie tube to see what makes it tick (or light up, as the case may be).

Don't you just love nixie tubes? They glow with a lovely neon color and have gorgeous stylized numbers-- something you can't get with a dot matrix-- or even sixteen-segment LED or LCD display.

Check it Out

- Chris

Evil Mad Scientists Release Egg-Bot Kit

Christopher Hazlett — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:06:41 +0000

Amazing kit from Evil Mad Scientist. The Egg-bot is, I think, an amazing execution of a novel and whimsical idea.

Evil Mad Scientist Egg-bot

So what's an Eggbot? It's a machine capable of drawing on spherical or ellipsoidal surfaces. You might say, a pen plotter for spherical coordinates. Or a simple but unusual CNC machine, ripe for hacking. Or an educational robot-- and you'd be right on all accounts.

Pre order yours today.

- Chris

jSON library for Arduino

Christopher Hazlett — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:44:19 +0000

Exchanging data with other computers can be a daunting task with Arduino. No matter if you just want to pass some information to Processing, to a Web Service or something else – You always have to encode the data and decode the answer.

There always have been solutions like XML for structured data. But XML is hard to decode, complicated an takes up a lot of space. And then there is JSON. JSON is an easy and efficient way to transfer data.

Check out the tutorial and library.

The Best POV Ever

Christopher Hazlett — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:42:56 +0000

I'm not usually one to ooh and ahh over a POV display, but this one takes the cake.

Check out the project page.

- Chris

Arduino and Android together at last

Christopher Hazlett — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:44:13 +0000

Bonifaz Kaufmann has released an Android to Arduino library. Check it out.

Balancing Cube

Christopher Hazlett — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:18:14 +0000

Saw this at Hack a Day. I dare you not to smile at the awesomeness.

iPhone inspired kitchen computer

Christopher Hazlett — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:10:17 +0000

A great project by Ryan in New Zealand. He has a great write-up and he's even open-sourced his interface.

- Chris

International Robot Expo 2009 (part 2: pick and place robots)

Alex Kane — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 17:53:30 +0000

Here's part 2 of my videos from the Tokyo International Robot Expo 2009. Part 1 of the series included a few different kinds of robots, whereas this post will be dedicated to one specific breed of 'bot: the pick and place.

Pick and place robots are industrial robots. They're useful for picking things up and putting them back down in a specific place. Some of these guys are really fast and can sort tubes of toothpaste or small chocolates coming down a conveyor belt at high speeds. Other models are used to place components on circuit boards, like this one over at Adafruit.

Now on to the videos!

In this first video we see pieces move down the conveyor belt and these two Epson 'bots pick them up and place them on a second belt. They're pretty quick but even so, the first one sometimes can't grab all the pieces and the second one is there to catch any that the first one misses.

This robot shows us how it can be used to sort small chocolates on a conveyor belt, very quickly.

A fast pick and place robot that takes tubes of toothpaste from one belt and places them on the other, changing the orientation of the tube in-flight so that they line up nicely once placed.