Hasta La Gadget!

Now that our Insert Coin: New Challengers contestants had duked it out and the judges have made their decision, we have a winner: Ziphius. Not only did the bot win $20,000 thanks to deliberation by our judges, but it came home with our $5,000 reader’s choice prize too. Victorious and $25,000 richer, the brains behind the aquatic drone joined us backstage to chat about their project. For the full interview, check out our video after the break.

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Filed under: Robots

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There’s been no shortage of movie projects that lean on crowdfunding to get production underway. Producing a movie based on a major TV series like Veronica Mars, however? That’s fresh. Creator Rob Thomas has obtained support from Warner Bros. and lead actress Kristen Bell for a Kickstarter funding drive that, if it hits its $2 million goal, will shoot a full-length Veronica Mars feature this summer with a premiere around early 2014. Pledge makers would be rewarded with anything from a copy of the script through to a speaking role in the title. To us, the real highlight is the planned release strategy — like an increasing number of movies, we’d be watching digital copies “within a few days” of the opening, rather than months. While Thomas and crew can’t declare the fundraiser over until April 12th, it’s advancing quickly enough that the focus is less on whether or not the project will go forward and more on its chances at becoming an internet-backed blockbuster.

Update: Just a few hours after kicking off its crowdfunding effort, the Veronica Mars movie project has surpassed its $2 million goal. Right now it’s hovering around $2,035,000, but we suspect it’ll balloon even further within the 30 days that remain in the campaign.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, Alt

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Source: Kickstarter

If you prefer robot bartenders to lack limbs that could be used against you in the impending robopocalypse, Bartendro might be your kind of bot. After two years of building and tweaking, the folks at Party Robotics have finally polished their Raspberry Pi-powered cocktail-making rig and have posted it to Kickstarter. Born from a need to re-create mixed drinks in perfect proportion, Bartendro uses food-grade tubing, pumps and custom-built electronics to pipe liquids out with a measurement accuracy of a milliliter. According to the projects’ site, however, it can’t quite handle carbonated beverages in its current state. By using a device connected to the contraption’s own WiFi network, thirsty folks will be able to select drinks from a web-based interface. Mixologists, on the other hand, can leverage the control panel to customize cocktail recipes, manage dispensers and even read reports of what drinks were made and how much of which ingredients were used.

Both the hardware and the software that make up Bartendro are open source, and the team behind it even wants to create an online drink compendium that’s free as in freedom and beer. The hope is that intrepid enthusiasts can hack together mods ranging from breathalyzers to a stirring or shaking mechanism. Early supporters can snatch a ShotBot with one dispenser for $249, a Bartendro with three for $375, a model toting seven for $1,199 and a fourth version carrying a whopping 15 for $2,499. However, crafty DIYers can roll their own system by pledging coin for individual dispensers and the Linux boxes that power them. The group has currently raised over $20,000, but it’s aiming for $135,000 to push the bot into production. Click the bordering source link if you’re inclined to chip in or hit the jump for Party Robotic’s pitch video.

Filed under: Robots

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Via: CNET

Source: Kickstarter

Haven’t we all suffered enough abuse at the hands of Big Smart Watch? No? Well now there’s Buddy, a Bluetooth smartwatch that aims to solve the problems associated with all those other watches. Buddy is focused on social networking and notifications so it will ping you when your Facebook or Twitter feed is updated as well as send the standard call/text/calendar notifications you expect from a smart watch.

The ambitious watch is the product of Vea Digital, a smartwatch company best known for their Sportive work-out watch. The company’s new project, however, is wildly ambitious. It has a capacitive color touchscreen, works with iOS and Android, and contains 8GB of memory in a package 8mm thick. It’s a huge watch, to be sure, and the renders/prototype models show a unique and colorful icon-based UI that might work better than the cramped black and white design of other devices.

What can it do?

The makers claim a battery life of “10 days or 2 weeks standby” which sounds like crazy talk. They’re asking for $320,000 to build the first run and have raised $42,000 so far. A black watch can be had for a pledge of $150 and they will be delivered in August 2013.

I’ll believe it when I see it, but if you’re looking to get in on the ground floor of an acceptably cool-looking smart watch, Buddy might be the way to go.

The Death Star is undoubtedly a worthwhile undertaking. Sure, in the Star Wars films it’s generally depicted as an offensive weapon but it could have terrific value as a defensive platform, too. The government recently responded to requests from the general public that it look into constructing the massive, moon-sized space station, shutting down the idea because of a short-sighted “we don’t blow up planets” political stance and an unwillingness to dip into the treasury.

Now, a new Kickstarter project wants to pick up those plans, using an open source design effort and crowdfunding to help make it happen.

The project has a £20,000,000 (over $30,000,000 U.S.) funding goal, which would be used to create “more detailed plans” than the initial design the team currently has (pictured below) and improve on the original from the Star Wars movies with some unique defensive measures to keep out pesky X-Wings. If the project reaches its stretch goal of £543,000,000,000,000,00 (or $850,000,000,000,000,000), then the plans will actually be put to use building a full-scale production Death Star.

The project’s founders don’t share much about their backgrounds, so it’s difficult to say if they have the chops needed to deliver on their stated December 2015 delivery timeline. And of course there’s always the possibility of Rebel saboteurs to consider, too. For what it’s worth, we’ve learned from a source that Darth Vader himself is confident things are progressing as planned. “The Death Star will be completed on schedule,” he was overheard to say in conversation with a high-placed Imperial executive.