Hasta La Gadget!

Like the Lego Batman action figure, this Lego Spidey is pretty damn amazing. Created by our friend Michael McCooey—hire this dude, Lego—it’s fully posable down to the most extreme and typical Peter Parker positions, including hanging upside down. Here are all the features: More »

Hear those school bells in the distance? It’s hard to believe, but the start of the school year is just a few weeks away — and all week we’ve been rounding up some of our favorite eco-friendly back-to-school essentials. From green school supplies to sustainable backpacks, we’ve got all your back-to-school needs covered. And to top it off, we’re giving away a laptop-charging Voltaic solar-powered backpack (worth $389) stuffed with green school supplies for a total prize package worth over $500. If we could go back to school and live in any dorm, we’d probably choose Copenhagen’s Tietgenkollegiet dorm, a circular building with community kitchens, cafes, music rooms and a central courtyard. And if we could choose any gadget to take with us, it would have to be the P&P Office Waste Processor, which can transform a basket full of waste paper into fully-formed pencils.

Continue reading Inhabitat’s week in green: solar powered toilet, pollution-fighting mural and the world’s largest rooftop wind farm

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Inhabitat’s week in green: solar powered toilet, pollution-fighting mural and the world’s largest rooftop wind farm originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 10:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Check out this cute little Lego Submarine in action in the video above, and you will be left scratching your head and wondering just how the entire thing was built from scratch. Aren’t Lego pieces, while being able to interlock with one another, do not exactly offer a waterproof and watertight solution? I mean, you can reconstruct the Titanic’s hull from nothing but Lego bricks, and she need not hit an iceberg to submerge to the depths of the ocean. Still, Lego builder “Brane” managed to discover a way of creating a Lego submarine which is fully capable of navigating through an aquarium, but gave no promises of it being watertight. What made it more attractive was the fact that you could control this remotely using an Xbox controller, sporting an underwater time of approximately 20 minutes. If only Batman had one of these submarines as part of his arsenal…

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Lego Motorized Wheelchair , Domaster and Tetrawing: The ultimate LEGO Game Boy creation?,

While you were trying to pass Poetry 101, Cornell seniors Le Zhang and Michael Lathrop were creating an apple-polishing Lego robot that automatically erases your prof’s chalkboard. A final class project, the toady mech uses an Atmel brain, accelerometers for direction control, microswitches to sense the edge of the board, magnets to stay attached and hot glue to keep the Lego from flying apart. As the video below the break shows, it first aligns itself vertically, then moves to the top of the board, commencing the chalk sweeping and turning 180 degrees each time its bumpers sense the edge. The duo are thinking of getting a patent, and a commercialized version would allow your teacher to drone on without the normal slate-clearing pause. So, if designing a clever bot and saving their prof from manual labor doesn’t get the students an ‘A’, we don’t know what will.

Continue reading Cornell students build spider-like robotic chalkboard eraser out of Lego, magnets, fun (video)

Filed under: Robots

Cornell students build spider-like robotic chalkboard eraser out of Lego, magnets, fun (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I was very impressed by the LEGO Omniboat, but apparently you can take LEGO vehicles even deeper. An engineering student made this remote controlled underwater robot for a school project. I expect bricks to sink, but I was surprised to see batteries and circuits fare well underwater.

The robot was made by YouTuber roboticsqut, who says that while the vehicle isn’t necessarily waterproof, most of its parts will do fine underwater, including the lead-acid batteries and the motors. Roboticsqut used a pair of XBee PRO adapters to send commands to the robot, which is controlled via an Xbox 360 controller that’s connected to a laptop.

Robotsqut should make more and equip them weapons and minifig crew.

[via Dexter Industries via Construction Toys via Reddit]