There’s this mega proliferation of flat-bed, cartesian type robots.. this is the way all the reprap energy seems to be going. There are loads of them. Everything from gardening robots
The advantage of the cartesian-approach is that you can get fairly good precision for fairly simple maths. This brings the cost of the engineering down. The advantage of arm-type machines is that they can make things bigger than themselves. And that you can have more than one of them working together. And that they take up less space. And you can get them to give you (fairly bad) hand-jobs, and stir your tea, and play ping-pong with you and so on and so on.
I think the key to this is sending feedback to the arm-motors… so the machine can recalibrate its position 1000 times a second. There have been a whole rash of balancing robots recently… segway progeny (in fact I think someone has actually made one out of lego) so I think it’s doable. I also think that the sensors could (should?) probably exist outside the robot itself – a bit like the recent bunch of precision quadracopters
So the maths is harder… but maths is a software problem, and we can do software.
The other day Shelley from Half-Land was going on about these ball and socket joints she was using for the little stop-motion figures she was using for her movie…
… so um… if I had to make these joints, this is how I would do it. This is the Kiwi version.
Looks a bit like some sort of makeshift prison weapon. This is the detail:
You could probably make bigger ones with wooden beads… but the general principle of using rubber bands to apply pressure to the join is kindof central. And adjustable.
You could possibly do something with heat-shrink tubing as well – for a (much) neater fit etc. I found the little rubber washer things work quite well as well. This example (as you may have guessed) is not in fact a chopstick, but is a bit of dowel.
Tiny little cameras that fit inside pens and can shoot 1.5 hours of 1,280×960 at 30fps… for $65
!!!
What’s interesting about that, is not the spying part, but the hacking part. It’s that they’re small enough to hack onto flying robots etc – and cheap enough to lose… or use as bifocals.
Can’t find any example videos to see what the quality is like. It’s a nice little unit though.You could use them for rockets or kitty cams etc
Both of which make me feel dizzy and sick. Still… Nick Drake is cool.
There’s been a fair bit of this in the last couple of months… prosthetics controlled by thought etc. There was recently a load of excitement and fuss to do with brain-to-speech synthesis… which may or may not be tempered by the fact that it only did 3 vowel sounds, and required a bit of implanted hardware that neurons grew around. Oooh. Aaaah. etc.
Still that is a bit like saying “yea, my dog plays chess but he’s not that good”. A hello-world is a hello-world. The difference between 0 and 1 is MASSIVELY different to the difference between 1 and 2.
I went on about this sort of thing in Feb last year. There’s an Open-EEG community… or was… but here’s the thing: if you don’t have a blog, no one can tell if you’re alive. I guess I could join the mailing list, but I’m already overwhelmed with mailing lists, and I’m only on about 5.
Anyway… a couple of things turned up recently that are partly related.
Waking you up when you’re sleeping lightly thing for iPhone – although according to wikipedia, there is some dispute as to whether being woken when you’re sleeping lightly is the best way to be woken… personally, I’d tend to go for something like this
But anyway, I saw the waking up watch/iphone thing a while back and had a spot of bother finding it again… and found that there are actually loads of such devices out there – the sensory bit is called an Actigraph – which sounds a bit snake-oily to me… like any advert that contains the words “scientifically proven”. As far as I can gather, all it is is a piezo, which measures movement… often filtering out everything except the 2-3 hz range… which is about the speed of a normal, common, every-day case of DTs. How that correlates to sleep, I couldn’t say, but that is apparently what’s being measured.
I think though the real value of this isn’t being woken up when you’re sleeping lightly, but the fact that it forces you to pay attention to sleep over a long period – keeping a sleep diary etc… which will probably make you aware of just how much caffeine, alcohol, stress etc are messing you about.
It would be quite cool to have something like a system-monitor for your body/mind going all the time. So rather than being pulled this way and that by laziness, gluttony and random whims, you do actually get to run yourself like a well tuned machine. Do what works, rather than what feels good in the short term.
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Off at a tangent – or something that comes in at a different level, something that also turned up recently is this pedometer that has an LED flower on the side of it.
and if you don’t do loads of walking, it dies.
Utter genius – it’s a tamagotchi that makes you do something you want to do, but can’t be arsed with.
“Captology” – capitalising on people’s amazing powers of nurturing and anthropomorphism etc. This is kindof what I was on about in my open-source energy monitor idea – setting up the interface so it’s kindof pavlovian… but this is so much better.
There are so many applications of this – turn your iPhone into a Chumby-like creature that you have to look after. Like having a familiar… or one of those daemons off Golden Compass. iPhone as pet. Brilliant.
This has been around for a couple of days – just got around to looking at it:
It’s image-scanning using an ordinary webcam rather than some fancy thing with laser-beams. Pretty amazing. I wonder if it could be used with bi-focal cameras to map the objects in a room. Could be a good way of stopping your Roomba from eating your socks.
I can’t quite believe that someone’s used a Lego-Mindstorms brain to do OCR
from From Sweden apparently… but who? Who in Sweden? Who in Sweden would do such a thing?
I mean it’s basically cheating isn’t it. First the Pirate Bay, and now they cheat at Sudoku. Incredible. I think I might move there actually.
This leading to that…
A lego-bot painting the Mona Lisa… and it only takes 1.31 minutes. It took Leonardo (arguably the smartest human ever) several years to do the same thing. I think that says something.
That aside… I’d be quite interested to see what happens when iPhones (or the open-source variant thereof) manages to hook into some sort of modular constructor-kit type set up. I did originally think laser-cutting might be the way to go, but laser-cutting is the most expensive way of producing identical, replicated pieces… and part of the point of identical, replicated pieces is that you actually get to play with the actual physical things with your actual fingers and thumbs etc…
… and this counts for a lot. I’m doing a lot with laser cutting at the moment… and even though it looks like a simple design->execution, it’s not. What it actually is, is design->prototype->mess-about-with-fingers/thumbs->second-design->second-prototype
and it generally takes around 3 generations to get anything right… and the possibilities don’t generally spring to mind until your fingers and thumbs get involved. Thinkism is not enough.
I’ve been telling people that we’re in the midst of a materials revolution for a while now. And do they listen? No they don’t. They throw peanuts at me. The pull my hair. They swing me round by my schoolbag until I fall over etc.
But they’re wrong. A lot of the truly amazing stuff that is going on at the moment is happening in the materials arena. The picture above for example is concrete who’s pattern only shows up when it’s wet.
Anyway, transmaterial.net has a new website documenting The Materials Revolution as it happens – lots of stuff that doesn’t appear on the other tech-tracking sites – but which personally, I find a whole lot more interesting than loads of things that go bleep, or “concepts” that are basically just some design student going all Roger Dean – doing a CAD version of a never-ending guitar solo from the 70s… and dreaming up some sort of form-over-function-fetish (shiney shiney techboy jackdaw) which will never ever be built.
Something that’s turned up a couple of times recently, is using an iPhone as a brain for some sort of other, slightly bigger thing, that’s got absolutely nothing to do with telephones.
eg: this electric superbike… which uses one as a dashboard.
I can see this happening more and more – rather than having a computer with lots of “plug and play” devices, you have a lot of devices and one computer/smart-stick etc that plugs into them.
iPhones are a bit different though – because they have eyes, ears, a sense of balance, a sense of location… a screen, an input device, web-enabled, sms-capable etc etc etc. It’s not just an extension of a brain, it’s an extension of a load of different human senses as well… though not as good as the real ones. Yet.
I can see this coming from the other end, and being a competitor for arduino actually. The potential of it is massive. Seriously… but iPhones are tethered, and they’re not open-source… and the future is open-sourced. So um… Android it is.
Quite good really – that’s got to be incredibly useful for something. Other than rugs I mean. Reminds me a bit of this thing I saw the other day being developed by DARPA
