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Oooh, check out this cool simple homopolar motor made with a standard AA battery, magnet, and some wires!

If you want to check out some real industrial motor stuff, make sure to check out our DIY with some industrial steppers.

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Check out this cool Roomba that can shoot continuous soft BBs to the target which it tracked through it’s laser sighting.

This is a current project of mine, hacking a Roomba Red. After seeing all the roomba hacks on MAKE and Hack A Day I really wanted to build my own bluetooth controlled roomba. What really finally motivated me was seeing all the different projects on TodBots site. I have an Arduino and have been wanting to learn Processing, this is my chance to do all three! For my first project I figured that I could use the camera off of the Sonarbot and find a video to usb converter for my laptop. Quick and easy remotely operated robot on the cheap.

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Tight, check out this really cool M&M Line Trace Robot! It’s awesome! They should sell these at M&M stores. (I recently bought a M&M sculpture for my dad’s birthday but this is even better!)

For the holidays, my local grocery store sold m&m’s candy containers in the shape of a racecar. The containers are painted metal (probably steel), with a thin plastic coating on the inside. A dinky package of plain m&m’s came inside, not peanut, as the yellow-color driver suggests.

About this same time, the ChiBots robot club began discussing holding a robot line-following contest. Naturally, the colorful candy tin seemed like a perfect body to motorize and drive around the course.

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These things have been around South Korea for last couple years. It’s a wheel style robot parking system. You can find your car by pushing on the touchscreen menus to retrieve your car. I’ve actually worked with couple people at my work trying to make touchscreen control systems before and these things are great for any big cities. I am just surprised there are practically none in San Fran. Bummer… Let me see if I can find more cool videos on these wheels style robot parking systems…

I saw this in Gangnam and thought it was a great way to maximize a tight space.

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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