Theo Jansen's Strandbeest has no doubt inspired many makers. Here's some tips if you'd like to recreate your own.
The post 6 Common Problems to Avoid When Building a Strandbeest appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Wednesday, November 30
6 Common Problems to Avoid When Building a Strandbeest
Ghosts, Magic, and a Kraken… Check Out the Winners of Our Halloween Contest
We have 6 lucky winners! Check out their awesome projects.
The post Ghosts, Magic, and a Kraken… Check Out the Winners of Our Halloween Contest appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Convert Scientific Data into Synthesized Music
Reimagine all of your scientific data as music with MusicAlgorithms, which can translate points on a graph to corresponding tones.
The post Convert Scientific Data into Synthesized Music appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Treadmills to endless hallways, tech has some sick solutions for VR nausea
Tom Atkinson
OXFORD, England—I first met Dr. Charles King at his ‘graduation’ from Richard Branson’s Virgin Media Techstars accelerator. The pitch he delivered to a packed audience in London described how ROVR—the company he started in 2012 with co-founder Julian Williams—was addressing a fundamental problem with the much-touted Virtual Reality boom: No matter how fun your content is, if it makes people throw up, it’s probably an experience they can do without.
According to King, two-thirds of us experience some degree of discomfort in VR even if we don’t quite “sell the Buick” as he so colorfully puts it. But Simulator Sickness (SS) is no laughing matter. A handful of experts say that exposure to some forms of VR can be as disorientating as getting drunk, and they call for headsets such as the Oculus and HTC Vive to be banned until more research is done on the long-term effects this has on our eyes and brain.
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Dawn of the Tripteron 3D Printer
Cartesian 3D printers were the original. Then delta printers came along, and they were pretty cool too. Now, you can add tripteron printers to the mix. The tripteron is an odd mix of cartesian and delta. The system was invented at the robotics laboratory at Université Laval in Quebec, Canada. The team who created it say that it is “isotropic and fully decoupled, i.e. each of the actuators is controlling one Cartesian degree of freedom, independently from the others.” This means that driving the bot will be almost as simple as driving a standard X/Y/Z Cartesian printer. The corollary to that are of course delta robots, which follow a whole different set of kinematic rules.
A few people have experimented with tripteron printers over the years, but as far as we can see, no one has ever demonstrated a working model. Enter [Apsu], who showed up about a month ago. He started a post on the RepRap forums discussing his particular design. [Apsu] works fast, as he has now demonstrated a working prototype making prints. Sure they’re just calibration cubes, but this is a huge step forward.
[Apsu] admits that he still has a way to go in his research – especially improving the arm and joint implementation. However, he’s quite pleased that his creation has gone from a collection of parts to a new type 3D printer. We are too — and we can’t wait to see the next iteration!
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks
Lighthouse Locates Drone; Achieves Autonomous Battery Swap
The HTC Vive’s Lighthouse localization system is one of the cleverest things we’ve seen in a while. It uses a synchronization flash followed by a swept beam to tell any device that can see the lights exactly where it is in space. Of course, the device has to understand the signals to figure it out.
[Alex Shtuchkin] built a very well documented device that can use these signals to localize itself in your room. For now, the Lighthouse stations are still fairly expensive, but the per-device hardware requirements are quite reasonable. [Alex] has the costs down around ten dollars plus the cost of a microcontroller if your project doesn’t already include one. Indeed, his proof-of-concept is basically a breadboard, three photodiodes, op-amps, and some code.
His demo is awesome! Check it out in the video below. He uses it to teach a quadcopter to land itself back on a charging platform, and it’s able to get there with what looks like a few centimeters of play in any direction — more than good enough to land in the 3D-printed plastic landing thingy. That fixture has a rotating drum that swaps out the battery automatically, readying the drone for another flight.
If this is just the tip of the iceberg of upcoming Lighthouse hacks, we can’t wait!
We loved the Lighthouse at first sight, and we’ve been following its progress into a real product. Heck, we’ve even written up a previous DIY Lighthouse receiver built by [Trammell Hudson]. It’s such an elegant solution to the problem of figuring out where your robot is that we get kinda gushy. Beg your pardon.
Filed under: drone hacks, robots hacks
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