Most efficient driving: steady speed or changing with the hills?

If you haven't checked out Gizmodo's videos from inside the lego factory, here's another encouraging link. They also have video of the shelving system robots that automatically store and retrieve legos from over 65 square miles of equivalent storage space.

A couple more Lego fun facts:

• The tolerance on the bricks is less than .00008 in. Human hair varies between .001 and .01 in.
• Only 18 / 1 million pieces fail inspection, according to this HowStuffWorks article.
• Lego now makes some 19 billion bricks a year.

Peter just posted a great review of our VOS Sequencer Kit. It includes pros and cons of the sequencer overall as well as the building process / instructions. He also posted a video of his VOSS in use.


Voice of Saturn Sequencer demo from Peter Speer on Vimeo.

This is a small but useful tip we got from talking to David at uCHobby about lead trimming. When leads are clipped they usually go flying off and are a pain to clean up as well as an eye hazard. By resting a finger on the tip of the lead while clipping, the lead just falls to the table. It's faster than grabbing the sides of the lead, although with thicker leads (voltage regulators, some diodes, etc.), grabbing the sides is more prudent unless you don't mind a lead hanging out of your finger.

A logic analyzer isn’t the most common piece of equipment in a hobbyist’s shop, so we thought we’d write a small introduction about what it is and what it’s good for. A logic analyzer is commonly used to debug circuits where two or more chips are talking to each other, like a central uC interfacing with external memory, a peripheral camera or mp3 decoder. The main advantages over an oscilloscope are that more than 4 channels can be watched at the same time (sometimes more than 80), and that the logic analyzer can trigger / record right where it’s needed, not just on the first (or every) rising edge. For instance, you could program one to trigger and record data only after a particular byte sequence occurs. Read on for the (brief) basics of how to use a logic analyzer, what features to look for, some links to inexpensive analyzers as well as home-brew versions, and our attempt to digest a play station 2’s controller protocol.

Despite the large number of guides already out there that describe how to communicate with a play station controller (or guitar hero), most do not cover all the details, or do so sparsely. We consolidated and tested all the info we could find in our new ps2 interface guide, including wiring connections, low and high level communication protocol. Also, MPLAB c source code for a PIC18f4550 is provided that demonstrates how to read all analog buttons (joysticks and button pressures) and control the vibration motors (works with the guitar hero controller, too). Most of the research was done while developing our MIDIATOR kit.

Pindar has created a robotic painting system named Zanelle that does everything from mixing paint to algorithmically shaping digital source images. Upwards of 25,000 brush strokes are applied in 12-36 hours to complete a painting. It would appear that Zanelle is intended to be more than a complex plotter, but rather a system that adds its own artisitc aesthetic (with some guidance from Pindar, perhaps). Read on for some pictures of the final paintings, as well as some before-and-after pictures from the neural net pre-processing.

specs say it all: 20 Megabyte hard disk drive, 720K floppy, 16 bit microcontroller, 2 DC motors, 1 Castor, polyethylene shell... Capabilites: straight line and turning motion, object detection, classroom education, security, home manager?, friend. $7k (~$12k today) according to goretro's blog.

From the theme song: "Bring the future home to you, he's watching you."

Do we really need human-like robots (like ASIMO) that try to do everything? Task-specific machines seem to do fine for many things, like a dish washer, dryer, or a chess program on a computer. A dish washer would be horribly inefficient if it had to make use of two arms...

Our new open-source kit is a PS2 to MIDI converter based on a PIC microcontroller, and we call it the MIDIATOR. It turns a PS2 or guitar hero controller into a MIDI controller. We'll be posting info on how to interface a PS2 controller with any microcontroller soon.

We went to Maker Faire 2008 in San Mateo, CA, and brought our video camera along. This is just a small sample of everything that was there, including the destruction of Pleo (cute robot dinosaur) in the battle bot arena, powered recliners wheeling around (and cupcakes), cement and candy 3d printers, a dirt cheap multi-touch table, Tesla coils, lots of fire, and a bunch of music interfaces. Check out the makerfaire website for more info.

We attended the annual concert / exhibition by GaTech's music technology and digital media groups. Here are some highlights: There was a multi-touch table with a variety of games and interactive movies, two Indian songs involving computers writing their own accompaniment based on real-time analysis, a virtual world where your movements create music, and a bit of wii art. And I almost forgot the computer-keyboard band... Click the heading for some links.