Hasta La Gadget!

For YouTube’s Geek Week, Tested interviewed robotics enthusiast Mike McMaster about his remote-controlled and life-size Wall-E replica. McMaster is part of the Wall-E Builder’s Club, a group of hobbyists who started planning on building a replica of the lovable robot even before his movie came out.

Image by Mike McMaster

Watch Tested’s video to find out the effort and ingenuity that Mike and his friends put in to make the robot:

As Mike said, you should join the Wall-E Builder’s Club if you want to make your own Wall-E. I wonder if they can make a flying EVE.

[via Tastefully Offensive & Mike McMaster]

Humans want to have friends. This need for companionship in a soul-crushingly indifferent world can lead us to confuse mechanical motion with human emotion, as shown in this video by researchers at the University of Calgary.

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Technabob contributing author Conner Flynn has a hidden talent – and I’m not talking about walking and chewing gum at the same time. The man knows his way around an Atari 2600 like it’s nobody’s business. Now it’s been a while since he built his epic Atari 2600 guitar, but his latest mod looks like it was worth the wait… I give you Atar-E…

Conner found this Wall-E Learning Laptop at a thrift shop, but he didn’t see a laptop at all (neither do I). Instead, he saw the home for his next portable Atari 2600 mod. Inspired by the modding prowess of Ben Heck and Bacteria, he tore apart the Wall-E toy and gutted it.

His design incorporates an actual Atari 2600 circuit board, along with authentic Atari woodgrain pieces. He went off the board with the controller and used an NES D-Pad instead of a traditional Atari joystick. Isn’t that sacrilege? Dogs and Cats sleeping together!

The controller replaced the original keyboard found on the toy, and he even rigged it so the controller section can still fold shut when there’s no cartridge in place. One thing Conner struggled with was where to put a battery pack for the system, so he gave Wall-E a little backpack. Isn’t that cute?

Games are displayed on a tiny color LCD screen, mounted where the monochrome display on the original toy was located. On the one hand, you’ll have to squint a bit to play on this thing, on the other hand, the pixelated 8-bit graphics look so much better when they’re shrunk down like this.

While it would probably take you a ton of work to try and build one of these for yourself, Conner says he may soon list it for sale over on his online toy store over at Botropolis, so keep your eyes peeled. On second thought, peeled eyes sound like a really bad idea.

[via Botropolis]

Robots are dime a dozen out there, and while we have seen some pretty agile and fast ones out there before, how about one that apes the way us humans swim? Who knows, the Swumanoid robot (which we talked about sometime last year) could be a way for scientists and sportspeople to analyze how one is better able to swim faster than anyone else out there. When the Swumanoid was being worked on, an Olympic athlete as well as a research team worked together to ensure that it was realized. The Swumanoid stands at 3 feet in height, and was based on the model of a Japanese Olympic swimmer. It does make us wonder, however, why not base it on Michael Phelps? AFter all, it was he who won a truckload of gold medals at the Beijing 2008 Olympics, and during the last Olympics, he ended up being the most decorated Olympian to date. Perhaps the decision was made because the research team was Japanese, and it made sense to go local, using an Olympic swimmer who did some laps in the water while relying on a special 3D scanner in order to mimic the motions of the robot, in addition to how the muscles actually moved underneath the skin.

Right now, the Swumanoid is rigged for swimming in freestyle, but it might be programmed to perfect the other strokes in the future. Unfortunately, Swumanoid is not going to break any world swimming records at the moment, since it moves at a relatively sluggish 0.64 meters per second.

Another Look At The Swumanoid Robot original content from Ubergizmo.

Folks in the UK are determined that we all know that it is Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary. They are doing all kinds of crazy things. For instance, the ice cream shop Snugbury’s, does giant straw sculptures every year. This year it is a 35-foot-tall Dalek.

Apparently the royal baby was a contender this year too. I’m so glad we got the Dalek. This straw Dalek not only looks amazing, it also has two fully movable parts, the head and the gun. Plus it has audio.

At least they can burn this Dalek and kill it easily if it gives them any trouble.

[via io9]