So many other people have gone on about this already that it seems kindof redundant… still, as I appear to be charting the progress of these things, here it is.
It’s like space-invaders come to life.
I’d be interested to know whether they’re truly autonomous, or whether they’re being controlled by the room – there seems to be a fair few sensors round the walls… which would suggest to me that this isn’t true swarm behaviour… it’s more like a multi-bodied single organism. Like The Borg.
Well, my latest kickstarter “investment” looks set to be a record-breaker.
At 8am this morning I received their first update email… which said “Woohoo! We made our target!”… 5 hours later, they’ve doubled it… and they have 30 days to go.
So far on kickstarter I have funded:
1) extruded Aluminum rollers – for CNC machines and Camera Sliders
2) a smartphone controlled robot
3) a universal smartphone to tripod attachment
4) a recycle plastic to make feedstock for 3D printers machine
5) a floating ecosystem/machine to create biofuels
6) open source, web-based video-editing software.
7) indestructable, modular earbuds
On indiegogo I also punted $100 to Jeniferever
I’ve also punted money to Wikileaks, and The Real News Network. I think that covers it. If America decides to <airquotes>call</airquotes> wikileaks a terrorist organisation, than I have materially aided terrorism and can be deported/imprisoned etc… but then so can a lot of people, and really, the only way out of this one is for everyone to go into Spartacus mode… everyone donate.
Still… two of the things I’ve donated to in the list above were just $1 – because I think they’re interesting projects and want to be kept on the mailing list. Of the things where I’ve pre-ordered… the only thing that’s turned up is a T-Shirt from Jeniferever… which is fair enough, since I gave them $100 and it was me that suggested they go on indiegogo in the first place.
As to the others? The roller-bearings should have been here ages ago. I’ve talked the bloke… apparently as I’m a donor, I should jump to the top of the queue…. still… vaiting vaiting vaiting. In the time that it’s taken this thing not to turn up, someone else (who did apparently get what they asked for) has made an entire 3D printer.
I’m not impressed with turnaround times… even if these things are still in development. I can remember when the standard mail-order delivery time was 28 days. Every magazine that had adverts for mail-order had 28 days as a standard policy. Amazon.com kicked that one right out the window. Now it’s A-fucking-SAP. I’ve ordered things off Amazon UK and had them turn up in the letterbox the next day. For my own mail-order stuff, I try to get them out the door same day that the order comes in. I find it really stressful having to wait 10 days for parts to turn up (If I’ve run out). It looks to me as though crowd-sourced funding could do with the same kick up the arse that Amazon gave mail-order. I know development takes time, but it doesn’t take that much time.
So… Kickstarter. Not a good way to do your shopping.
In terms of investment? If they make this helicopter, then the whole thing is worth every penny… in fact if any of these things come off then it’s worth every penny… but particularly the helicopter.
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ps: And Kickstarter STILL doesn’t have an RSS feed even though I’ve told them twice that they need one – and their navigation is kindof crap… all about “staff recommendations” and “popular”. I’m not interested in “staff recommendations” or “popular”. I’m only interested in every single new thing that turns up, preferably filterable by category, and I don’t want to have to manually revisit their site looking for updates. That’s last-fucking century – so instead of finding new things through their site, I’m reliant on other people’s blogs, and twitter.
So that’s today’s complaining out of the way.
edit:
So it looks like the reason that Kickstarter pulled this project is not (as I’d thought) that they took fright at the legalities, but because the people involved were quite possibly bullshit-artists.
Which is a shame. Still. There you go. The excoriating eye of the internet is a tough one to fool once it’s got you in its sights.
I expected the robots to be hyper-self-conscious about the other robots criticising their work, and so becoming a overcritical themselves so tensions built up and built up, and a single misjudged comment set off a huge quadracopter fight and when the people in the lab-coats came in the the next morning there’s loads of quadracopter feathers everywhere and all of them are gone except for one fat one.
It’s a big protest in Poland – I don’t think the drone is a police one… the uploader has other videos – it looks like one of these
And is not in fact DIY… they’re made by a Polish company
I can see how these things would be invaluable on either side – being Kettled? No problem – there’s 10000 of us and only 400 of you. I bet repressive regimes like England or America make them illegal. I bet we wind up with anti microcopter microcopters (or jets or jammers or whatever). That’s what happened with planes… firstly they were used only as surveillance… then as “nuisance-bombers”… then for fighting other planes… and then as a primary tactical piece on the board. It’s a kind of inevitable progression… from herbivore to predator.
I think it’s really interesting that this first one of these flying over a protest (in one country at least) is not in fact owned by the forces of old and evil… but by someone else. An entrepreneur? A hobbyist?
I had kindof imagined that these were going to be used for tourism… that you’d be able to hire one in Prague… sitting at home in (where ever it is) and cruise about looking at the sights etc. I guess we have better things to do. Still… welcome to Poland… cobbled streets, old buildings etc. God I miss Europe.
And you know… if you can hire these… in “trouble spots”, journalism is never going to be the same again – which is no bad thing. Mind you – if you could hire these in “trouble spots”, then there’s nothing to say that they couldn’t be armed, and joining in. In the 1930s people from the UK went to fight the fascists in Spain. Armchair-drones may allow us to do the same thing again – without getting out of our armchairs.
That would be fairly impressive if it actually had people controlling them…. but they’re doing it on their own, which goes beyond being impressive and actually becomes a bit scary.
Strange – I would have thought hexapods would have been the platform of choice for all this machine-learning/playing stuff. Apparently not
So further to the inevitable, but entirely ill-advised drift into small weaponsied robots, is this
Which is a linux-based wifi finding and hacking machine grafted onto a “toy” parrot AR-Drone. About $600 all up.
I’ve been planning these for ages – won’t ever get it together mind, but this is how you fuck up institutions you want to fuck up – fly a wifi-hacker up onto the roof and transmit their dirty secrets to the world. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an aerial-hacking machine like this, but this is definitely the prettiest – and the Parrot drone is a pretty cool machine, because you can see through its eyes.
Still kindof big though – the trouble with tiny toy helicopters though, is that they’ve got about 5 mins worth of battery power. I’ve gone on about this before… anti-nuke though I am, I think we need some sort of pocket-nuke device to persue Moore’s law in various directions. The main reason I’m anti-nuke is because I’ve seen what a bunch of fucking corrupt old cunts holding the world over a barrel because they’ve cornered the energy supply did to the 20th C. What humans do when their lives are dependent on systems that are optimised for scarcity is worse than the inherent dangers of nuclear power itself. By a long way. This is the reason not to have a nuke industry… not because nuke power is dangerous (but sorry, it fucking is) but because the nuke industry is dangerous. Any industry is dangerous.
However – decentralised is cool, and this is that:
It’s a little nuke battery – from University of Missouri – not sure what the environmental impact of a couple of billion of these being thrown into landfills would be… but it does offer a way past the flying microbot power-supply bottleneck.
Not saying this is a good thing mind – it just is… (but I’m a technophile, so I’d say “yes”)
Of course if you want to shrink microcopters to the size of wasps, it might be simplest just to use… wasps. I have a feeling that nano-tech as-imagined-by-sci-fi will actually be a bio-mech hybrid. There’s just so much bio-systems can do without even thinking about it. Self replication for example.
Now I know I’ve used examples of these before as marvelous accomplishments etc… but… maybe they took ten million hours of film and just chose the best bits?
Actually, even with crashes these things are fairly impressive. And a bit scary.
Not just because it’s a guy flying a quadracopter, doing the 1st-person POV thing through video-glasses…
… but because it’s a hippie house with solar panels and a garden and broken down cars in the front yard. That’s what I’m talkin bout. It’s got that whole pre-post-apocalypse thing going on.
It must feel quite frustrating flying around a gadget like this without guns or rockets or something. It’s like when you play space invaders your whole life and then you try are car-racing game and it’s like “WTF? I’m not allowed to shoot the other cars?!?!”
It’ll be deemed a major breakthrough when quadracopters become silent. Wonder how hard that is.
This is the difference between “memory” systems (like CNC) and sensor-controlled systems. The feedback loop is where its at. Once you have a feedback loop you can start applying genetic algorithms to problems – and basically create a one-solution-fits-all approach to creating things.
I was over the other side of the country yesterday – small town in NZ (ok the 14th biggest, but it’s still small)… and the engineer guy that I’m getting to build my next project told me there were 8 other firms that do CNC-controlled metal-folding in town. His own shop was large-garage sized. Single office, couple of people attending the machines. Similar sized operation to one I just visited in my own town – who have a 9-axis CNC machine. The guy who I was talking to talked a lot about a “lights-out” operation… basically you set the machine up, leave for the night, come back in the morning and its basket contains 100s of things that its made.
Meantime, I occasionally get parts made for me in China – 5000 units at a time. I talk to someone named Jane… and we swap photos of our cats etc. I was picturing something similar – but I saw a brochure the other day and their plant looks like the matrix – machines arrayed to infinity in all directions.
So while we still have a planet, that looks to me like the shape of manufacturing – small, local high-tech shops that can make pretty much anything… and massive automated plants somewhere else on the planet that can deal with huge scales. Whether there’s anyone left who can afford to buy any of these products is another matter… and I guess that’s where the DIY stuff comes in… but I don’t think DIY is ever going to catch up with the high-tech end of things.
Unless it starts using sensor-feedback loops and genetic algorithms. Repraps always were about evolution. Natural-selection is built into the model. Kindof makes sense that the software itself uses natural selection at a much lower level, so the process of machine-creation is much more organic.
In the future we’ll have robots that vacuum your carpet when you wave your arms around and yell at them. Admittedly this does take longer and use more energy than just doing the vacuuming yourself, but it’s good exercise and in a fucked up sort of way, quite fun, especially if you dress up as a bigger robot yourself.
Still – never mind about that… I was going to go on about this robotic mayfly I saw before, but now it’s gone and I can’t find it, so here are some vids of flying things
