Okay, I’ve finally been able to stay away from the computer thanks to my girlfriend. But we are back for some more hacks and DIYs.

Check out these cool solar lawnmower robots and mop robot if you don’t want to spend $200 on a Roomba. You could probably make these inventions a little bit smart by adding a programmable controllers such as CUBLOC or Make controllers… Arduino would be good too.

Solar Lawnmower robot: tired to cut your grass? you have just to press a button and the robot do the job for you. Once the job done and the robot stopped, it’s internal battery is solar charged: no cost. The solar lawnmower robot is very quiet and make about the same noise as an electric razor!

-Mop robot: tired to use mop to wash your floors? Throw away you mop: use mop robot, add a bit of water, some liquid soap and just press the button: the robot is stupid, slow but it does the job alone and quietly.

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Yes, it has been done by students from University of South Florida. Great job guys!  These guys should really make a new start-up company making whole bunch of these for farmers…

Our idea for this project was to develop an “intelligent scarecrow” called the Erebus Scarecrow. The system is designed to protect ponds at a fish farm from bird predators that can cost farmers thousands of dollars in losses. The Erebus Scarecrow helps the environment by introducing an effective non-lethal method of pest deterrence to protect the birds and to prevent the spread of disease and contamination of the raised fish.

As a requirement for the Windows Challenge, our environment of development was Windows CE 5.0. We were provided an eBox II with Windows CE and tools to develop for it after being accepted as one of the top 200 teams worldwide. I was in charge of everything Windows CE related, from creating the custom operating system image with Platform Builder 5.0 to deploying and debugging our application with Visual Studio 2005.

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Ooooohhhh, check out this cool LED POV! You can do current time, signs, and more! Nicely done!

From the pictures you can see there’s a motor on the rotor shaft (with the blue housing), and an additional one below the mounting plate. The first motor turned out have too little power to give the rotor enough speed. So I added another motor and a gear, and put stream line wings on the LED bar. The first motor had the rotary encoder attached, so I left it where it was. The second motor came from a tyre pump that runs from a car cigarette lighter outlet. When I first connected the motor to a 6V lead acid battery, it drew 20 amperes and the rotor almost took off like a helicopter! I figured the motor would run hot in less than a minute and burn out. 6 volts, 20 amperes, that gives you 120 watts! So now it’s running from a power supply on a 3 A current limit, and the supply voltage is around 3 volts.

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Here’s a tight ass robot!

While simple yet robust behaviors can be achieved without a model at all, here we show how low-level sensation and actuation synergies can give rise to an internal predictive self-model, which in turn can be used to develop new behaviors. We demonstrate, both computationally and experimentally, how a legged robot automatically synthesizes a predictive model of its own topology (where and how its body parts are connected) through limited yet self-directed interaction with its environment, and then uses this model to synthesize successful new locomotive behavior before and after damage. The legged robot learned how to move forward based on only 16 brief self-directed interactions with its environment. These interactions were unrelated to the task of locomotion, driven only by the objective of disambiguating competing internal models. These findings may help develop more robust robotics, as well as shed light on the relation between curiosity and cognition in animals and humans: Creating models through exploration, and using them to create new behaviors through introspection

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Wow, check out this awesome homemade balancing skateboard. As a skateboarder myself, this is way too cool…

It’s very similar to a snowboard to ride, requiring no user input other than the movement of your body mass. Leaning forwards and backwards controls the velocity and moving your weight from heal to toe controls the turn radius. It’s easy and very intuitive to ride.

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Check out this octopart search engine for electronic parts. It seems to searching mouser, digikey, and other major electronic part companies for stuff.
The creator dropped out of school to make this so everyone please take a look!
P.S. I couldn’t find any Make controllers, Cublocs, or any controllers that are not being sold through the major suppliers… (maybe they can add them…)

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Wow, check out the wifi-robot from wifibot.com!

WiFiBoT comes to fill the gap between the simple toys and the sophisticated but
expensive robots that can be found today in the market. In our platforms you will find
the right compromise between cost and sophistication so you don’t overshoot your
needs with any complicated gear

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