in the wee hours

The Archives

  • terribly early in the morning
    Phoenix 1 - Mars 0 Uncategorized | (0)
    Whooo! The Phoenix lander has successfully made it to the surface of Mars! I watched the live feed at around 10am this morning. It was a great watch with all the NASA scientists on the edge of their seats hoping for the best. It all turned out better than could be hoped in the end. Phoenix landed successfully (using retro rockets no less) and has already started transmitting back images from the surface. Great to see a probe make it intact for a change. :) Check the links below for more info on the Phoenix mission. ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Open source SLAM software available for download Uncategorized | (0)
    I spent the weekend working on my vision server again. The face detection part is down pat so this time I had a go at the facial recognition part. So far I have the SOM (self organising map) is successfully categorising most of the images I am feeding into it (just using test data for now) but there still seems to be quite a few of the images that I would subjectively have though were very similar even though they are being mapped to different nodes in the SOM. It's almost working, I think I might need to visualise the output ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    RoboExoticUS 2008 Uncategorized | (0)
    Do you like robots? Do you like drinking? Do like robots making drinks for you to drink? If you answered yes to any or all of the above questions then you are in luck because RoboExoticUS 2008 is currently on and it is awesome. :) Like Lynx industrial arms and the Roomba, RoboExotica focuses on the main purpose of robotics research - 'Making our lives better'. In this case, that is by developing robots that can make us delicious alcoholic drinks (which *could* be translated into 'Making our ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Build your own Predator Uncategorized | (0)
    Chris Anderson of DIY Drones has a great new project using our favourite RAD (rapid application development) embedded platform otherwise known as the Arduino. The ArduPilot is a low cost auto-pilot setup that will have you spying on insurgents and calling in airstrikes flying around and taking pictures of people's rooftops in no time. And all for the cost of a new pair of trousers (depending on the exchange rate at the moment of course). Chris has a good breakdown on DIY Drones of all of the involved components and their approx. cost. Check ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Even Cheapo-er Uncategorized | (1)
    If you are struggling future robot millionaire and you are looking to get into robot building then You have come to the right place You should check out Cheapo or Simple Bot 0.1 Simple Bot, built by Batist on Coded.be is another really simple bot that you can get up and running in no time at all. Unlike Cheapo it seems to use a DC motor gearbox with two motors (instead of the servos I used in Cheapo). Because of this it uses a H-Bridge motor driver ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    More Cheapo Uncategorized | (2)
    More pics and ramblings :) I was going to do a full write up but then realised I had told you pretty much everything in the last post. The actual construction of Cheapo is not that interesting and I could have done it with any bits of plastic or metal I had lying around. The cool thing about using the plastic covered foam is that it is a) so cheap and b) so easy to work with. To cut it I just used a Stanley knife and a metal ruler. As long as it is layered correctly the plastic foam is ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    A new robot in the family - “Cheapo” Uncategorized | (0)
    Meet "Cheapo", the new robot in the family. Or should I say, nearly the new robot in the family. Cheapo is still under construction and was basically an experiment to see what I could build with a minimum of material and cost. It's late so I'll save the full write up of Cheapo's construction for tomorrow but basically it is constructed using a piece of plastic covered foam sheet that I bought from an art store a while ago. The foam sheeting is really light and strong for what it is. To stick everything together I just used double sided ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Wall-E @ Maker Faire Uncategorized | (2)
    Awesome, when can I get one! Wall-E is the main character of the new Pixar movie that is coming out sometime this year. Disney, Wowee (of robosapien fame) and Thinkway have teamed up to develop the Ultimate Wall-E robot as a tie-in. From the video it looks like it has a lot of expressiveness and would be a great toy to hack more intelligence into. :)   Check it out here: Wall-E @ Maker Faire
  • terribly early in the morning
    Pleo vs. Vicious Verdict (Warning: Graphic robotic carnage) Uncategorized | (0)
    Poor little Pleo, it didn't stand a chance! Video: BotJunkie: Pleo vs. Battlebot at Maker Faire (I'm publishing via Windows Live Writer just to see how it goes so there might be some craziness for a bit :))
  • terribly early in the morning
    RoboNews #8 Uncategorized | (3)
    Phew, back... :) My feeds are overflowing with items of robotics goodness so here we go! My LED display project is sort of working but sort of not Yes, I know I said I was going to get my swarm bot going (it's not really a swarm if there is only one though now that I think about it... :)) but I was distracted by a shiny object and decided to spend the weekend trying to display video from my webcam on a 16x8 RGB LED matrix (Inspired in part by Juan's question I may add). I built another set of cables and a ...