Hasta La Gadget!

We won’t even front — we’ve got a thing for visiting National Parks, and in a way, we’re dangerously envious of these fellows who crafted this here BeetleCam. In short, the device is a wildlife photography robot: a four-wheeled, remote control buggy that holds a DSLR, a couple of flashes and enough torque and battery life to power through African wilds for hours on end. After months of testing, building, rebuilding and rebuilding again, the BeetleCam was packaged up and carried over to Tanzania’s Ruaha and Katavi National Parks. During the fortnight-long excursion, the buggy managed to survive being mauled by a lion (sadly the same can’t be said for the Canon EOS 400D) and get staggeringly close to elephants, African Buffaloes and other untamed fauna. Frankly, this is one of the more amazing homegrown gadgets we’ve seen in quite some time, and we couldn’t encourage you more to hit up that source link for the full spill.

BeetleCam wildlife photography secures stellar snaps in the wilds of Tanzania originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’m a big fan of the RIM Blackberry Bold 9000. It’s a solid-feeling, decent-working QWERTY smartphone with a lovely high-res screen, lots of apps to download, and an excellent e-mail inbox.

It’s not perfect, though. On AT&T’s spotty 3G network, it can drop phone calls faster than “The Bachelor” switches fiancés. Then there’s the trackball–the little rolling wheel that replaced the old Blackberry’s scroll wheel. It’s a lovely innovation that owes much to old-school trackball-based computer mice. Too much, in fact. The newest BlackBerrys feature a track pad. Sadly, I don’t have one of those.

In any case, the phone has been working fine except for the trackball, which has gotten stuck a few times. I’ve been able to move the ball around with enough force that it rights itself, until last week, when the ball would only roll down and from side to side (though not consistently). As a result, I couldn’t properly scroll up though e-mail, documents, websites, and my Twitter feed. I also couldn’t work with most menus. It was like juggling three balls with one hand tied behind my back. So I decided to try to find a more permanent solution.

Apple haters, cherish the moment while you can. The Magic Mouse’s odd ergonomics aren’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea — including some of us at Engadget — so we were more than a bit stoked when our silicone lump from MMFixed arrived in post today. Installation was straight-forward and mess-free thanks to the small suction pad underneath, and despite the fairly strong attachment, we were able to easily slide or rotate the soft cushion on the mouse for adjustments. We’ve had no problems with multitouch input thus far, and the old wristache-after-prolonged-usage seems to now be a thing of the past. So yeah — it’s safe to say that this squidgy fix was well worth the $10 investment (although it has gone up to $12 now, which is hardly the end of the world). You could say that it’s rather silly to fix something that’s supposedly magical, but we suppose even the best tricks could stand to be improved.

MMFixed’s Magic Mouse fix hands-on, literally originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Do we need an excuse to show you a gallery of the most amazing, mind-bending mechanical spiders ever to emerge from the fevered brains of roboticists?

No, we do not.

Something about multilegged creatures just seems to fire the imagination of robot builders. Their stability, agility and — let’s face it — creepiness are hard to match.

They’re fast, resilient and occasionally cute. They climb walls, leap off buildings and spy on enemies.

The amazing thing is how many people seem to be building multilegged robots lately, from NASA to British defense firms to French performance artists.

Technically, not all of these are spiders. Many stand on six legs, not eight, and some were modeled after cockroaches rather than tarantulas. Details, details.

On to the spider robots.

Above:

La Princesse

Ironically dubbed “La Princesse,” this 50-foot spider bot roamed the streets of Liverpool in 2008. It was an art project that, instead of sending people fleeing in a panic, drew crowds of admirers. La Princesse was constructed by the French performance art firm, La Machine.

Photo: Matthew Andrews

The Cellbots gang has been furiously productive as of late. Not even a month after their wooden “boxbot” was first spotted on You Tube the project has moved on from its humble beginnings of lumber and windshield wiper motors to a full-on a neon green acrylic Truckbot that uses a G1 and Arduino board combination for control. Sure, we’ve seen Android-powered robots before, but these guys have done some pretty cool things, and have no intention of stopping now. They’ve already implemented an ultrasonic range detector so the ‘bot can override the operator and prevent itself from running off a cliff (although we’d like to suggest mounting one on the rear as well — for obvious reasons), voice recognition, and the Android compass into the control system. If anything, the amount of progress makes this project very well worth keeping an eye on. Move past the break to see some video, and then hit the source link to keep up with the action yourself.

Continue reading Android and Arduino-packin’ Cellbot features voice recognition, autonomy, and charm to spare

Android and Arduino-packin’ Cellbot features voice recognition, autonomy, and charm to spare originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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