Hasta La Gadget!

I’m sure that chess has dozens – if not hundreds – of virtual versions that let people play against each other online. This project by YouTuber FunGowRightNow12 and his fellow students at Northeastern University also offers online multiplayer, but it’s not a videogame. It uses a couple of physical boards along with chess pieces that move on their own.

FunGowRightNow12 and his group-mates made the wireless chess boards for their senior project back in April 2012. The end result of the project is nothing short of magical: you move your chess piece, and the corresponding piece on your opponent’s board does the exact same move and vice versa. It even takes captured pieces out of the board for you. Since the commands are transferred via the Internet, you and your opponents could be anywhere across the globe and you’ll still be able to play with the pieces.

Sadly, FunGowRightNow12 didn’t go into details about the intricacies of their project aside from what he and his group-mates shared on Reddit, but they did post a couple of additional videos. This one shows what’s inside the board:

It looks like there’s a robotic X/Y arm with a retractable magnet on it for moving the pieces around, which is similar to how those Phantom Force computerized chess sets work. The big difference here is that you can play with another human on the other side of the world using this system.

The video below shows how the system handles less straightforward maneuvers such as castling and rescinding illegal moves. In the case of the latter, FunGowRightNow12 and his pals hooked up a computer with a program that determines what the valid moves are at the start of every turn. If it detects an illegal move, the turn will be suspended until the player makes a correct move. Only then will the turn be sent to the other board.

Genius isn’t it?

[via YouTube & Reddit]

Adafruit‘s Flora wearable platform is barely a year old, yet it already has a little sibling on the way — and we do mean little. The newer Gemma is Arduino-programmable over USB like its relative, but measures just over half the size of the Flora at an inch in diameter. It’s even bordering on cute, as far as circuit boards go. Before developing any grand visions of wearable computers, though, be aware that Gemma’s features scale down with its size: there’s only three input/output pins, and a limited amount of memory won’t let it handle more than about a dozen of Adafruit’s NeoPixel lights. All the same, any aspiring tailor willing to trade flexibility for subtlety in a costume will likely want to sign up for notification of the Gemma’s in-stock date at the source link.

Filed under: Wearables

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Source: Adafruit

Arduinos are fun to tinker with, but there’s one problem. Once you’ve built something cool, you pretty much have to tear it down to use your board for another project. Sure, you can always buy multiple Arduino boards or proto shields, but what if you want to turn your creation into something a bit more permanent and a lot more compact? Say hello to Permaduino, a small battery-powered Arduino prototype board that just launched on Indiegogo. It features an Atmega328P (natch), two AAA battery holders with a 3 to 5V DC-DC converter (up to 180mA), a 25-column breadboard with VCC and ground, plus FTDI, AVR-ISP and USB interfaces. Best of all, Permanuino conveniently fits inside a standard 8mm videotape case (as long as you don’t mount large components on that breadboard). Interested? Hit the break for the Indiegogo link and campaign video.

Filed under: Misc

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Source: Permaduino (Indiegogo)

We’ve already seen cockroaches turned into unwitting puppets for human overlords, but never have we seen dominance quite so casual as with Brittany Ransom’s recent Twitter Roach art project. While part of the exhibition, one of the insects wore a modified RoboRoach backpack with an Arduino add-on that took commands from Twitter: mentions including specific hashtags steered the roach left or right by stimulating its nerves. Yes, that meant the poor roach rarely had the dignity of seeing its master face to face, although there’s some consolation in knowing that it wore the backpack for limited periods and had a required 30-second pause between instructions.

As to why Twitter Roach came to be? Ransom tells CNET she imagined the currently dormant project as a reflection of the “overstimulation” us humans encounter in a digital world. We can certainly sympathize given our livelihoods, although its existence makes us nervous about 2013. If we’re fighting off remote-controlled insect armies a year from now, we’ll have to admit we had fair warning.

Continue reading Twitter Roach takes guidance from tweets, ushers in a terrifying 2013 (video)

Filed under: Robots, Alt

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Via: CNET

Source: Chicago Artists’ Coalition

While I don’t often hold stock in random pronouncements by magazines, I’m shocked and thrilled that Entrepreneur Magazine named Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, as their 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year. Limor runs a $4.5 million company with 25 employees and she produces some of the coolest electronic gadgets around.

It’s amazing that Adafruit Industries exists at all – after all, the average code jockey doesn’t want to handle solder or jumpers. However, the company has made it easy for electronics hobbyists to learn almost everything there is to know about some amazing microcontrollers, Arduino boards, and even skill badges for geeky Boy Scouts. They’ve taken off, selling $10 million in gear this year.

Limor started her company in her MIT dorm room by selling electronics kits to her friends, making about $10 on each kit. Soon she moved to New York and in October moved from a 2,000 square foot office to a sprawling 12,000 square foot loft in Soho.

You can read the article here but you’re actually better off heading over to the Adafruit website and picking up a few kits. Nothing beats the feeling of firing up a homebrew electronics project and I’m thrilled to see the maker community band together to elevate one of their own amazing hackers.