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Nice bit or biomimicry.

Does my head in how easy it is to anthropomporhise these things. Or Shrewopomorphise.

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Apart (perhaps) from the German Ginger Catweasel… who seems to have a slightly French Accent, with a large dash of Scandinavian. Swiss then.

Seriously though, this is a really cool toy. Possibly steals a bit of the thunder from the Twine thing

THAT MADE OVER 1/2 A MILLION $ ON KICKSTARTER!!! even though it actually looks like a the sort of wax that you use to make skis go faster. The strength of Twine though is that it provides an interface a bit like an Email “Message-Rules” interface… which is actually a bit of a quantum-leap I think… and an application that would have a lot of traction in smartphones… because 5 years from now, there’s probably going to be quite a lot of them lying about not being used… and they have FAR more sensors and smarts than Twine, already built in, already with drivers, already working.

Speaking of which – I managed to sell over $1000 worth of Golden Mean Calipers in one day a couple of days ago… so am finally cracking and getting a smartphone. From no cellphone at all to $800 smartphone in a single bound. I kindof needed to anyway because I’d bought one of those little smartphone robots from Kickstarter…

Something I felt semi-obliged to do, even though I didn’t have a phone myself, because I’ve been predicting this would happen for the last couple of years.

The last thing I invested in in Kickstarter was the 3D Printing Filament From Recycled Bottles project… I just punted them a single dollar (they’d already made their goal) because I want to be kept up to date with how they get on. I’ve actually paid to be on a mailing list… although obviously the motivations are a little more complicated than that.

Back to the modular toy robot… although that’s really cool, when I say “Steals the thunder from Twine”… what I mean is “It doesn’t really”… because what Twine is, is a general-purpose device… so is therefore more configurable etc. One is really good for putting on a coffee table and playing with… kindof executive-toy-like… the other potentially has real-world applications. Additionally, the Modrobotic thing currently costs $160 for a minimum set… and the benefits of having more than one set multiply… so it’s possibly a bit expensoid to be hacking into real-world apps.

Interesting though. Kindof gives the lego concept a whole new dimension. When I was a kid we had a lego-like system made up of 1cm cubes that could click together (probably still got it somewhere). This is kindof like that, but each cube can actually do stuff.

This is Catweazle

ps: … ahhh… I knew those things looked familiar

Pipe-cleaning bot. It cleans pipes with dry-ice, is joystick controlled… but best of all, it has a 1024×768 camera… only about 1/2 the size of 1080p… which is CINEMA QUALITY.

That’s what I’m talking about. Have you seen that movie Sleepdealer? Mexican… high concept, although plotwise it wasn’t quite enough of a head-fuck. When you get into that sort of territory you need to be doing serious headloop stuff like the 1st Matrix, or that one where Arnie pulls a pingpong ball out of his nose. Good film though. Worth seeing.

Ignore the twonklet with the deep voice talking over the top of it.

Anyway… Pipe-Cleanerbot. Like a thing off Sleep-dealer.

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1) Really fast reprappy type thing from Holland.

Imagine it’s the early 21st C version of these

… which is also from Holland… in fact there are people who say that Laurens Janszoom Coster invented the printing press, rather than Gutenberg… so… you know… fair enough.

2) Projections onto Laser-Cut Paper

3) Cookie Making Robot

4) Similar Robot – using AI to do stuff

Starting to look quite convincing these things

5) Lego CNC Machine

A significant, space-race like milestone will have been reached when a Lego CNC machine capable of printing its own blocks is created. It’ll happen, I guarantee it.

6) Magnetic draw-bot

7) Another Lego Drawbot

Which reminds me a bit of the big-basin UFO, that looked incredibly promising for a while but which… went away.

Somebody’s actually made a plastic one

Which is pretty cool.

8) Poseable Art Mannequin

9) Zorboid Scribblebot

Not actually a robot at all, but do we care? No we do not.

from

also from

positioning systems I – falling objects from pe lang on Vimeo.

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Volksrobot also worth a look… there are loads of these actually

If I had to vote for a quantum leap for repraps, it would be these combined with real-time sensor-based location calibration… so the head doesn’t need to “remember” where it is.

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German Factory Uses Robots to Print Human Skin

And coming in the other direction

Artificial skin – flexible, touch-sensitive, solar powered… because it’s simpler to give each unit its own power supply than try to hook it up so some sort of grid.

Robot Earth is a service where robots can exchange information about their environments… Like Pachube (which is like google analytics for hardware) but different devices can access other devices’ data.

Potential privacy issues of course – but cellphones are already such privacy-disasters, I doubt that it registers. It also raises the likelihood of remote-hacking I think. Like the Iranian Nuke Worm – which looks as though it was a deliberate aggressive act… but instead of fucking up a nuclear centrifuges, it messes with your vacuum cleaner. And your TV. And your Blender.

I don’t know if it’s just because I have the sort of mind that…

… but I can think of a hell of a lot more evil uses for this than good ones. There is something inevitable about it though – in an Internet of Things, that there be some universal protocol-stack invented so anything can talk to anything.

And now there’s this

Which is the same thing, possibly turned into something useful… ie: if you make your eyelids flicker, you can make your screen go 3D.

LOL etc.

This also reminds me of that Bismark thing… where the coolest looking geek in the world

With the coolest name, hacked a camera to detect flashes from other cameras – then project “messages” onto whatever’s been photographed.

What it makes me think of, is using censors to bypass the body’s stimulus-response circuits and make hard-coded reflexes. Like something out of an Iain Banks book – hyper-reflexes. It’d have to be fast to be faster than human reflexes… but machines are already faster than human reflexes. A LOT faster.

There’s been various ripples here and there about insects being grafted onto robots… and vice-versa… and really, the whole Internet is just that, done with humans… only there’s a kind of analogue-hole. The interface between machine and human is still voluntary… and hell of a woolly. I can see there being a lot of scope (probably entirely evil) of something involuntary. Something like Mechanical Turk for people who are asleep. Sleep-Dealer.

Maybe not. What do we actually need people for again?

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ps: I’ve decided to get.the.fuck.away from social-media – or just become less enslaved to it – so from now on “even” days are social-media-free days. No facebook, no twitter. No checking in every fucking 2 minutes to see if I might have missed something.

Only I feel the need to tell someone about this… to tell… “the internet”. My entire social context… so I’ve blogged it. That doesn’t count as social media. It’s writing.

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Here’s a thing about Martin Luther King. Watch it. Watch it twice.

Endless from Dirk Vander Kooij on Vimeo.

VIA Ponoko

Plastic chairs made from ground up fridges

What I find interesting about this – is that it’s using a proper robot arm instead of a cartesian table – and I really think that this is the way forward… basically because it means that the robot can build things bigger than itself. It can build a wall around itself so no one can tell it what to do, and it can sit inside, happily humming to self, making LOL cats.

This is a second hand Chinese machine. At last, the Chinese are exporting their crap to the west. Because this is what their top imports from the US are:

Speaking of which (kindof), the other thing is that it’s using chipped plastic rather than extruded plastic that comes on a massive cotton-reel thing. Chipped plastic cuts out a whole stage in raw-material preparation.

Now I’m a guy who sits on the sidelines heckling – not actually doing anything myself… so far be it from me to advise… but advise I do. There it is.

This is my back yard.

In other news,

An acre of virus-infected tobacco can yield a ton of material that makes 10x better batteries than current technologies… as part of the long-time-coming, never-actually-getting-here biotech revolution that we hear so much about.