Hasta La Gadget!

It always amazes me how humans will do so many silly stunts. I’m not sure if that makes us stupid or awesome, but it’s always entertaining. Chris Todd made a homemade floating hamster wheel boat so that he could “walk” across the Irish Sea.

It’s more or less a simple pontoon boat that’s powered by walking in the wheel. The idea was to walk all 66-miles across the Irish Sea from Wales to the East coast of Ireland. Sadly, he had to stop around half way because of a faulty rudder and bad weather.

He was pulled to safety by a support boat, but the watercraft, called “Tredalo,” ended up at the bottom of the Irish Sea where the fish now have a new wheel to play with.

[Dvice via Geekologie]

So you might not have the kind of hefty bank balances that oil oligarchs have, but that does not mean you have not forgotten to stash away a healthy amount of money in your savings account over the years, which is enough to purchase yourself this lovely retirement gift to share with friends or a loved one – the HotTug. To put it in a nutshell, the HotTug is a wood-fired hot tub in which you can sail, while doubling up as a tugboat for you to enjoy warm baths. With or without water, the HotTug remains a wide and stable boat with a capacity for up to six to eight people, depending on their physical size, of course.

The boat itself is made out of wood and fitted with glass fiber reinforced polyester, carrying a stainless steel stove with a single wall pipe along with it. You can choose from two different models, one with an integrated electric motor of 2.4 KW or another with an outboard. Depending on the model or make of your choice, the HotTug will retail anywhere from €8,950 all the way to €16,450. Sure, you can purchase more than just a decent car with that kind of money, but does your car have a jacuzzi inside? Come to think of it, that would not be such a great idea after all, either.

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[ HotTug is a jacuzzi in a boat copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

When they’re not breaking world records, fuel-hating Wave Glider seabots like to indulge in other hobbies, like shark tracking. One of the vessels has just been launched off the coast near San Francisco (vid after the break), adding a mobile worker to the existing local network of buoy-mounted receivers. They monitor the movements of electronically tagged sea life, including the fearsome Great White, picking up signals within a 1,000-foot range while researchers from Stanford University analyze the data from the safety of the shore. Better still, the free Shark Net iOS app gives anyone the chance to track these things, and activity should increase as the monitoring network (hopefully) expands along the west coast and more bots are introduced. You didn’t think the world’s fascination sharks was limited to only a single single week, did you?

Continue reading Autonomous Wave Glider bot launched to track sharks, beam real-time data to your iPhone and iPad

Filed under: Robots, Science, Software

Autonomous Wave Glider bot launched to track sharks, beam real-time data to your iPhone and iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With all this talk about unmanned drones, it was only a matter of time before a couple of interesting projects would surface. Check out FishPi, an unmanned water vessel which will run a cheap Raspberry Pi computer to try and cross the Atlantic Ocean. Will it succeed?

Its creator, Greg Holloway thinks that FishPi will succeed. It’s currently in the proof-of-concept phase. The autonomous, slightly robotic, drone will also feature a 130 W solar panel that will power it. GPS and a servo controller board helps it guide through squalls. There’s a compass, motor and camera, which can capture video as well.

The prototype version measures 20″ in length, and wards off the elements thanks to a plastic sandwich container. I think that the final build will need to be a bit more refined than that, but if they ultimately set a whole bunch of these off on an Atlantic journey, then odds are that one of them might just make it.

[via Ubergizmo]