Happy holidays everyone. Enjoy the time with your family and friends and the days off you might get. Here’s a holiday Rube Goldberg machine from Quirkology, it starts a little slow but then grows bigger and basically becomes a wonderful Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate) miracle. Have fun! Stay safe!
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Dexter Industries makes a Raspberry Pi add-on called BrickPi, which connects the ultra cheap computer to LEGO’s NXT Mindstorms parts. To show off what you can do with its kit, they made a robot that reads eBooks aloud.
The BrickPi Reader was designed to read from the Kindle app on the Nexus 7 tablet. Aside from a Raspberry Pi and LEGO, the BrickPi Reader also has a Raspberry Pi camera. The camera takes a picture of an eReader’s screen. The Raspberry Pi then uses an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to extract text from the picture. A Text-to-Speech engine reads the extracted text aloud. Finally, its Mindstorms arm taps on the Nexus 7′s screen to turn the eBook’s page. When you think about it, it’s basically a Rube Goldberg machine.
But don’t say goodbye to Audible just yet. Not only does it take the BrickPi Reader a few minutes to convert a single page, its “voice” is also horrible. Maybe it’s soothing to baby robots.
I love how they show a guy wanting to read an eBook while driving, as if their finished contraption could be used in a vehicle. Still, who would’ve thought LEGO could read?
[Dexter Industries via Make:]
At 20,000 to 25,000 dominoes total, what you’re seeing in this video doesn’t come close to the world record
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This might be an ad for Beneful dog food, but who cares. The Dog Goldberg Machine is just the greatest, most adorable pup-powered kibble and ball distributor ever.
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Remember how Red Bull made that amazingly ridiculous athlete-powered Rube Goldberg machine? This is how they did it. And it includes 11 athletes, 12 different machines, 4 RED cameras, 45 GoPro cameras, a 75 person crew putting in 3,422 man hours and a helluva sawdust. More »
Yeah, it’s absolutely an ad for Red Bull but so what. This extreme athlete-powered Rube Goldberg ‘machine’ is even better than the free running machine they pulled off a month ago. Watch the entire thing and you won’t believe how they use world famous athletes like Lolo Jones and Ryan Scheckler to pull off one stunning act after another. More »
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