Check out this cool robot mower, LawnBott. There’s also Robomow, which is very similar. If you are lazy and like robots, you might want to give these a try on your next lawn mowing…

The LawnBott LB2000 Professional Robot Mower is a fully autonomous , the LB2000 model will cut your grass every day, leaving its home docking station as programmed, cutting your lawn for up 3 hours, and then returning to its docking station as its battery gets low, all on its own. After it recharges itself, the LB2000 will leave the docking station all by itself and cut again. You will now be able to enjoy your week-ends!

I went to the Silicon Valley Electronics Fleamarket in San Jose this morning. It was great, I wanted to buy everything! I was too busy looking at all the cool stuff to actually buy much. I’m definitely going to this every time they have it…next one is May 12th, 5am to noon. Here’s a Flickr photoset with some pictures and comments from the fleamarket.

If you use Linux, you know Xeyes is a simple program that follows your mouse movements. You can check out some web examples of Xeyes. You can even paste this javascript code on your website for Xeyes on the web.

Anyway, Hunz created physical Xeyes that stands on his window and follow people’s walking movements. Tight! We want one.

The eyes are made from large pizza boxes cardboard and rolled by RC-servos that are controlled by an ATTiny2313 that’s connected to the PC using the low-speed software usb stack. The camera is connected using USB as well. Since I disassembled my webcam and hooked it up to an FPGA for some experiments, I used an analog one and a USB video digitizer.

The video processing is done using mplayer. It’s cropped first to get only the street and no neighbour estates. Then a tiny & quick&dirty video filter plugin looks for the column with the strongest Y-component difference between the last & current frame and if the difference exceeds a certain threshold, that column is passed to the microcontroller using libusb.

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Check out some of the cool stuff and people that are going to be at the Maker Faire! (Including us but we have no idea what to bring…yet)

We will get to play with an electric giraff (hopefully) and meet with submarine maker Mike Wernecke.

You can get some tickets for the Maker Faire in San Mateo Fairgrounds here.  And check out Maker Faire in detail here.

There’s some cool Maker Faire Pictures from back in the day here.

More Past Participants and Pics from Maker Faire’s Past

• Engadget at Maker Faire Part I
• Engadget at Maker Faire Part II
• BoingBoing and LaughingSquid
• CNET at MakerFaire

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Cool, check out these plans for that show you how to build your own chopper for like 40 bucks and also check out the electric conversion of a Honda bike resulting in 0 emissions!  Here’s a book you can get that will help you build a chopper from scratch.

Go bikers! They save the world!

The batteries were scavenged from my Autonomous Telepresence robot, Sparky. We purchased a new Perm132 motor, golf cart controller, charger and throttle from Electric Motorsport in the East Bay. The owner Todd is a builder and racer of electric motorcycles, so he was able to offer us great advice, especially helping to determine the correct gear ratio and spocket size. These components were not exactly inexpensive, but almost all the other materials were scrap, junk, or part of some other project, so ultimately the cost was reasonable.

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Check out some of the cool Antartic autonomous solar robots being developed here. Above is a picture of a guy (yes holding a laptop), snow-surfing at about 5mph…

Not too bad on solar power, we give thumbs up for that.

One morning, while taking walking behind the robot and dragging a sled of equipment for quantitatively measuring the strength and cohesion of the snow underfoot, we realized what fools we were to man-haul the equipment ourselves. And, for that matter, how silly even to walk. So, we hooked the sled to the robot and went for a ride. The robot, it turns out, can haul its own weight (nearly 200 lbs.) on a sled and hardly notice it.

This image was another born out of spontaneity, and yet has become of the most popular images from the whole project. Snow surfing behind the robot is not very exciting however; it only travels at a slow walking pace.

I just got back from my first “real” vacation in a year and a half (where I went somewhere…) to Las Vegas! We drove about 10 hours there and almost veered off the road couple times from lack of rest and sleep BUT the good news is that I took a picture of this cool motorcycle made out of wood at the local gift shop near the strip. Cool… will someone buy it? This was the most expensive thing in the store. Free shipping… What a piece of art!

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Wow, check out this cool new bike with continously variable transmission!

Bicycle transmissions have clearly caught up with those of cars. We’ve already seen automatic transmission bikes by Shimano and others—and now there’s a continuously variable transmission (CVT) in this Ellsworth bicycle that works in a similar way to our Honda Civic Hybrid.

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