We’ve seen a hexacopter with six legs, but this quadcopter takes after birds instead of spiders. This particular quadcopter is Vishwa Robotics’ test unit. New Scientist reports that the company is developing leg add-ons for “small US air force drones.” The legs will allow drones to perch on branches, wires and other objects in order to survey and conserve energy.
Vishwa Robotics founder Bhargav Gajjar modeled the legs after those of the American kestrel. A computer controls the drone’s landing based on footage from a camera mounted on the drone: “Just like a real bird, the drone has to brake sharply just above its landing site and perform a controlled stall in order to touch down.” The legs’ strong claws allow a drone to stay upright without using any power. In addition, drones can also use the legs to walk short distances.
Vishwa Robotics is also testing its legs on fixed-wing drones, bringing us that much closer to seeing tiny Valkyries.
Medicom has released a 400% (11″ tall) Bearbrick of the 60 meter-tall Colossal Titan, one of the giants terrorizing the poor citizens in the world of Shingeki no Kyojin, aka Attack on Titan. I’m not sure if there’s a 1% bearbrick inside.
This horrifying bear is limited to 500 units and is available only to Japanese residents, going for￥7,140 (~$70 USD) each. Bite your browser and breach Bearbrick’s walls to order.
Jimmy aka 6kyubi6 made a working Star Wars-themed pinball machine using LEGO. Aside from its moving parts and different colored lights, the machine also has various minifigs and figures of Star Wars characters, including Luke, Darth Vader, Chewie, Artoo and even Jabba the Hutt.
Jimmy made the machine for a Brickpirate contest. Here’s a shot of the machine all lit up:
There’s a short video of the machine in action below, as well as more images of the pinball machine on his Flickr page.
Oscilloclock shop owner Aaron’s latest offering is based on a vectorscope, a special kind of oscilloscope used to analyze the quality of television or video signals. Like its brethren, the digital age has reduced the need for vectorscopes, but Aaron can make them useful again as clocks.
Like his other oscilloclocks – one of which we featured last year – the VectorClock uses Aaron’s custom controller board, which draws shapes on the screen by drawing circles, with certain parts of the CRT screen blanked out depending on the desired shape or character. Aaron is proud of this particular build, which is based on a Tektronix 520A vectorscope, because he was able to use nearly all of its exisiting circuits, thus minimizing internal modifications.
As you’ll see in the demo video below, the VectorClock can display the time and date in a variety of ways. It also has dimmable lighting and can even display words.
It looks like something you’ll find at the Darkwaters General Store. Contact Aaron if you want him to build you a VectorClock. He probably doesn’t accept bottle caps as payment.
I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot. It’s run by an ATMega microcontroller, has a 128 x 64 LCD display and two RGB LEDs for each drive that light up in sync with the music. All of its parts are neatly arranged on a machined aluminum rail.
According to Simon, depending on the file extension of the selected MIDI files, RumbleRail will either map MIDI tracks to the drives, map MIDI channels to the drives or just play as many notes as possible at once. Here’s the RumbleRail playing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song:
And here it is playing the Ghostbusters theme song in the dark, because it ain’t afraid of no ghost:
They sound like highly organized mosquitoes. Fire up Lynx and head to Simon’s website to find out how you can build your own RumbleRail.
Defend yourself from sword strikes and shark bites in the office with Thinkgeek’s Chainmaille Mail Necktie. It’s made of anodized aluminum, so I guess it will offer some sort of protection from corporate get-togethers.
The funny thing is, it’s the necktie part that isn’t genuine. I think it’s more of a choker with a huge pendant.
Ride to ThinkGeek and get the Chainmaille Necktie for $30 (USD). I’ll wait for the plate necktie.
We usually hear of fictional worlds brought to life in Minecraft, but there’s more than one way to skin a globe. A group called the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project or MED-EM has been using a program called Outerra for the past 5 years to make a realistic model of the world of The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy books. Redditor and MED-EM member cameni shared some images of their virtual planet online.
Outerra is a 3D graphics engine specialized for creating planets and terrain. It’s been in development since 2008 and is still in alpha, but it seems to have attracted a following already. One of its defining features is that it lets users create a world with “unlimited visibility”, where you can start viewing the planet as a whole and then zoom in and see details of entire hundreds of kilometers of lands, landforms and so on, up to tiny blades of grass. In other words, you can explore every inch of virtual Middle-earth. There’s not much to see, but that’s what imagination is for eh?
If you’re a Middle-earth tourist like me, check out these two annotated images by Redditor coomb. Here are some of the important locations in Middle-earth:
And here’s Frodo’s journey, as told in The Fellowship of the Ring.
That’s one long journey. Even if it wasn’t dangerous I can see why Gwaihir and his homies didn’t join the trek.
Before Tolkien fans get upset, MED-EM knows that their model isn’t perfect. For instance, Redditors and MED-EM members Redrobes and monkschain pointed out that Mordor is a desert and even has a little snow, but that error stems from limitations on Outerra’s biome options.
Monkschain also said that they used several real world locations as inspiration for some of the areas they made: “Parts of NZ were used for the White Mts. The Alps for Misty Mts. Carpathians for Mordor. Chalk Downs of England for parts of the Shire, Africa for Far Harad. Finland and Norway, etc for the far north.”
There’s a banana for scale in there somewhere.
MED-EM is only focused on building the planet, not populating it.
Hence you’ll find no structures, elves, hobbits or monsters.
Here’s a video of the world that monkschain made last year:
Disney’s Touché concept can turn many ordinary objects into touch sensors. But what if you could buy materials such as wood, foil or paper that were already touch-sensitive off the shelf? That’s one of the dreams of a group called Embodied Interaction. To prove that the idea is applicable, the group made sheets of flexible and cuttable multi-touch sensors.
According to researchers Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Dr. Jürgen Steimle, their multi-touch sensor works even when parts of it are cut because of two main factors: how the electrodes – the points that sense touch – are wired to their connectors and where the connectors are located.
As the group claimed in their research paper (pdf), in conventional touch sensors electrodes are arranged in a flat grid and are wired to the connectors and to each other, as seen above. This presents two problems. First, several electrodes are dependent on one wire. Also, because the connectors are located at the edges of the sensor, you can’t damage or cut out those edges or you’ll leave the whole sheet useless. That won’t cut it for a cuttable sensor. In addition, conventional touch sensors are not made of materials that are hard to cut using ordinary tools.
What the research team did is to come up used circuit printing technology to make flexible multi-touch sensor sheets, in which the connectors are at the center of each sheet and the wires connect to as few electrodes as possible. In what they call the star topology, each electrode has its own wire to the connector. A second arrangement called the tree topology there are a few central wires that branch out and handle their own batch of electrodes.
The end result is a multi-touch sensor that can be cut into a variety of shapes, although obviously they couldn’t cut a hole in the middle of the sheet.
Of course, the challenge of wiring these touch-sensing sheets to a microcomputer is another matter altogether. Still, it would be nice if you could build your own touch-sensitive furniture, gadget or tools. Haed to Embodied Interaction’s website for more information on the concept.
Each pillowcase measures 16″ x 16″, has a concealed zipper and is printed on both sides. You can order a gold and black colorway or specify your own color combination.
All the power, wisdom and courage in the world won’t be of use to you if you’re sleepy. This brave link and $29 (USD) will save you.
And with "just" I mean 11.4 million years ago, even while Steve Fossey just detected this bright and rare Type Ia supernova using a ‘modest telescope in an unlikely spot: foggy north London.’ Scientists say that it will be visible in the sky soon, as it brightens up. Here you can see the supernova appearing in the sky, in a before an after image of M82, the Cigar Galaxy.
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