Hasta La Gadget!

This year, give your Valentine something special. Like some Valentines Day Costume Tribbles. Don’t feed them, or you will be overrun with the furry little critters. And if your Valentine is a Klingon, find another gift. Tribbles don’t like Klingons one bit.

This pink, purring Tribble responds to your touch and sound. This cute guy is just $24.99(USD) from ThinkGeek, and is a geeky and romantic gift for any Star Trek fan. Make sure that you get rid of any quadrotriticale you may have first.

A few years ago we found out about mighty Roombas that were moonlighting as sumo wrestlers. Jose Julio’s RepRap 3D printer also has a sporting spirit. The robotics enthusiast unlocked his gadget’s potential and turned it into an air hockey player.

The robot has three motors: two for moving its mallet across the y-axis and one for movement along the x-axis. Jose Julio wrote the drivers for the motors in Arduino. He then color-coded the mallet and the puck, installed a PlayStation Eye camera and wrote a program in C to make his robot see. Finally he wrote another Arduino program that predicts where the puck will go so that its motors can react appropriately.

Another neat thing about Jose Julio’s setup is that the table uses two old PC fans to create a cushion for the puck to slide on.

Jose Julio knows that his robot still needs a lot of practice – and programming – before it’s ready for primetime. For instance, it doesn’t know where the goal is, though as you saw in the video it can already score even with that handicap. But Jose Julio says he can easily imagine RepRap enthusiasts making air hockey robots of their own, improving and refining its programming so that robots could have different difficulty levels and even different strategies.

Insert a token in your browser and head to Jose Julio’s blog for more on his project.

[via The Next Web]

Minifigs are often hated and feared by humans because they are different. Also because it hurts when you step on them. True believer Glen Bricker wants to build a haven for these extraordinary toys with his proposal for an official LEGO X-Men X-Mansion, aka Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

Glen’s proposal is for a four level mansion that folds out to reveal its rooms, which includes the famous Danger Room, Cerebro, Professor Xavier’s office, Beast’s laboratory and Storm’s attic garden.

Glen included 45 minifigs in his mockups to make the proposal more appealing, but he knows that the number of minifigs – if any – that will be included in the playset will be far fewer. He knows that LEGO and Marvel will have the final say, but if he had his way he’d include Prof. X, Beast, Shadowcat, Gambit and Mystique and maybe Storm and Cyclops as well. What did Wolverine ever do to you bub?

Team up with the Uncanny Browser and head to LEGO Cuusoo to vote for the proposal. Glen also suggests reaching out to Marvel – either through Facebook, Twitter or sending them an email at officex@marvel.com – to let them know about the proposal.

[via Glen Bricker via Super Punch]

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

Adriá García of DIYMakers augmented a Wall-E toy by making it work with voice commands and giving it the means to move on its own and avoid obstacles. It doesn’t compact garbage or collect curios, but at least it can dance.

Adriá used an Arduino Uno as Wall-E’s new brain. Two infrared proximity sensors help the toy detect obstacles, actuators move its arms and head and two continuous servo motors power its tracks. Adriá used the EasyVR module for voice recognition.

AUTO, navigate to DIYMakers for more details on Adriá’s mod.

[via BonjourLife]