Check out the Hover Bot Arena Flash game if you are bored. Use arrows to move and your mouse to shoot at other hover-bots! Cool game…

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 these cool retro-lookin’ robots. Although they don’t really seem all that functional, they kinda have the cool “retro” look to them.

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

Wow, check out these color changing shower heads! It seems pretty basic (probably just high intensity LEDs on top), regardless, we like the overall design and originality! I’d love to have one of these showers, it’d be really cool… (well, maybe we can hack one easy…)

Perfect for creating a dramatic accent color, or merely for it’s therapeutic effect the lighted shower head embraces contemporary style. Created by Signorini Design, the Ultra Slim shower head is available as both a ceiling-mounted and a wall-mounted shower head. The wall-mounted version elegantly reaches out from the wall, while the ceiling-mount shower head has two styles. One which offer a flush mounted finish and one which suspends from the ceiling. Available from Signorini Design, the Ultra slim shower head adds a bright vibrancy to your daily shower routine.

via trendir

Check out this really cool robot that will even apologize to you if he/she bumps into you!

This cleaning robot from Japan can scoot around on its own, cleaning up, and features WiFi and a video camera to keep it connected to home base. It can even apologize when it detects that it’s bumped into a person. Yes, that’s good; train the robots young to fear and revere their human masters. We’ve got to watch our backs, after all.

via scifi

Check out the hilarious tofu robot. The original pictures of the tofu robots are on Flickr too. Although it’s non-functional, you can get it at spicybrown for $20. Maybe someone can hack this tofu robot to be functional… maybe serve up some tofu soup…(talking about tofu soup, there’s tofu sauce, tofu seasoning, tofu seafood, etc…etc…)

The Japanese are always coming out with some really funky cool robots…

Check out this cool DIY on making a submersible shark camera! I’ve never gone shark fishing, well I don’t fish anything I can’t eat and big sharks don’t look like they would taste good. (But I like Tuna and all the other cool edible fish in the big ocean…)  Here’s a cool cheap way to make a submersible cam also…

Last year while shark fishing off the Dumbarton Pier and recording the catch on a 20 year old VHS camera I had an idea. I thought of how cool it would be to jam a camera in the mouth of a big shark and let him swim away so then you could see what he was up to when he opened his mouth since sharks are coolest when they’re biting through stuff. Images flashed through my mind like: giant teeth surrounding the perimeter of the video while the shark opens his mouth and engulfs a cell phone or a car tire (it is the san francisco bay after all). Judging by the expression on Gillian’s face as I described my vision, I realized the idea had limitations. So I decided to do the next best thing: make a submersible camera with shark bait all over it, dunk it in the sea and wait for something cool to happen. PUT SKETCH HERE

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