Blood! Hardware! Heavy metal! Add some sand paper to your old dead hard drive and turn it on to make an excellent grinder/sander for your next hard-core steampunk project.

via Make

If you walk into a bar and see this robotic arm situated at one end of an air hockey table drinking a Miller High Life with a cigarette hanging from its lip yelling “Who’s got next?!", don’t, under any circumstances, play against it for money. It’ll beat you pretty badly. Politely offer to play a gentleman’s game and if the arm refuses, just walk away.

The robot was developed by a company called NuVation and recently won a People’s Choice Award at the Freescale Technology Forum 2008 Americas conference. You might not actually see this apparatus in your local hangout anytime soon, as it requires a pretty elaborate air hockey table setup (sensors, a computer, and so forth) but maybe you could build one of your own as a weekend project, eh?

via Crave

What do you do with an old floppy drive and a disk? Why you make it into a musical instrument, forcing the motor or the drive to play the Imperial March from Star Wars.

I’m not sure how this was done, but I love it very much.

If you’re one of the dozens of Americans thinking about finally upgrading to a digital TV when the Big Switch comes in February of next year, you might want to consider a conversion kit. They’re cheap, and the government is giving a $40 coupon to those looking to switch over. And if you’re wondering if your current TV is compatible, it is. In fact, this enterprising UK man upgraded a 51-year-old set that’s been in his family since it was first purchased in 1957.

It’s likely the oldest set ever to be converted. While we think you’d be happier with a widescreen flat panel set, there’s something charming about these old console-style sets, but they’re no good for Halo 3.

Jacob Seidelin is fast becoming the Ben Heckendorn of Javascript games. You may remember that in early April, Seidelin programmed all of Super Mario Bros. into 14 Kb of Javascript code. This month, he’s tackled Super Mario Kart in about 11 Kb of code.

It’s not the full game, however.

“So far, it’s just racing. No weapons or any of that fancy stuff. At the moment, you can choose from 3 different drivers (Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach) and 2 different maps (Mushroom Cup Round 1 and 2). There is no lap count, no timer and no finish. You can just race around forever and try to beat the others (it’s not hard, especially if cut a few corners). The AI is rather crude, but seems to work ok for the time being.

There is (simple) collision detection against the boundaries of the map and the colored “blocking” blocks, but not against the karts, so you can’t crash into the other drivers. Drive safely, anyway!”

But hey, it’s Javascript. Very cool, nonetheless. Check out Seidelin’s blog post here, which links to the game.

via Ajaxian

I prefer to work in complete silence. “How can you work in complete silence all day?” my friends and family ask. “Be quiet and stop bothering me,” I tell them. That being said, I’d prop a couple of these little guys up on my desk for good measure.

Says MAKE,

“Flickr pool member Fungus Amungus made these chic speakers using Munny figures as enclosures. Not sure what level of hifi those little guys can deliver, but considering the cuteness factor – I might not even care much.”

I agree. Here’s a bunch of cool speakers from Jason Siu as well.

via MAKE

Arduino boards are very cool little system boards that let you do all sorts of cool electronics tricks by adding a few sensors and writing some code on your PC or Mac. Now theere is the Adruino Nano, a board that packs in the power of the Arduino Diecimila into something the size of a stick of gum.

The board is based on the ATmega168 and has 16 I/O pits, 6 analog inputs, a USB jack, and most of that means nothing to me since I stopped building my on electronics when I realized resistors came in multiple colors. My buddy Paul is really great at this stuff so maybe I’ll have him make me a tele-dildonics kit.

Delicate movements by robots are fairly difficult. After all, most robots are made of milled metals and death-dealing neutronium, so you can’t really pick up “egg or an electric lamp.” Using ferromagnetic materials, however, the hands made by the Department of Electricity and Electronics and the Basque Country Faculty of Science and Technology can clutch more delicately than standard robotic hands and have more range of movement thanks to softer metals.

As regards magnetic and ferromagnetic shape memory alloys, the UPV/EHU researchers designed a device which had a precision of positioning objects to within 20 nanometres. Being a handmade device with a simple control, the researchers do not doubt that it can be improved. Moreover, it could be a serious candidate to substitute current high precision devices, given that positioning devices manufactured with ferromagnetic shape memory alloys have the great advantage that, once suitably positioned, they do not consume energy. The use of FSMA actuators could become highly important in certain applications, for example, in large-dimension telescopes that have a great number of mirrors that have to move with great precision in order to focus correctly.

Brooklyn defense contractor Atair Aerospace has two of its futuristic (and working) designs on display at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a superhero exhibit that’ll be running until September 1st of this year.

“The Met exhibit includes Atair’s EXO-Wing™, the world’s smallest human-piloted jet airplane. Exoskeletons for increasing human capabilities were once the subject of fictional comic book writers; now it has become real technology to enable human flight. This futuristic aircraft is constructed from advanced aerospace composite materials. The twin micro-turbine-powered EXO-Wing™ is so small and lightweight that a human wears it like a backpack.

The Met is also displaying Atair’s AeroSuit™, an engineered bat-like flexible wing suit constructed with advanced composite textiles. This high-technology garment allows a skydiver to glide to a target miles away from the drop point. The arms and legs of this garment include inflating webbed panels that form the elements of a wing which dramatically improves the aerodynamics of a skydiver, providing a safe and extraordinary flight experience. Both innovations are made from a new generation of composite textiles pioneered by Atair which are engineered to perform under extreme conditions.”

Cool, hey? Atair also has a bunch of other cool stuff like the Onyx precision-guided parachute system, the Long Endurance Autonomous Powered Paraglider (LEAPP) UAV, the Circinus GPS-Integrated Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), the Heli-Chute, and 3DZ Composite Parachute Technology.

via PRWeb

Arkados is a company that makes a pretty nifty set of chips that are often used in home automation products by third party companies, among other things. If you have any kind of integrated sound system or automated control deck than you might be using Arkados’s technology without even knowing it.

To take advantage of this, Arkados has released a reference design for making interactive software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a cool idea, being able to turn on the fan in your living room from across town with just a piece of hardware you’re already carrying with you.

Right now it’s just for the audio systems the company helps with, meaning you can control your entire music library from room to room with your iPhone as a remote. If you entertain often or just like each room to have its own ambience, it’s a great idea. In the future, when it’s more fleshed out, it’ll be like the Jetsons.

Oh noes! This sad eagle named Beauty had her beak shot off a few years ago which left it almost impossible for her to eat in the wild. Volunteers fed and took care of her but now she’s getting a robo-beak courtesty of a raptor recovery center in St. Maries, Idaho. The eagle seems to understand that it is being helped because it stayed, unrestrained, on a table for two hours while doctors worked on the beak. It will be strong enough for her to eat normally but she might not be able to tear flesh like she used to.

We had a foosball table in one of the houses I lived in during college. We all chipped in $40, times six of us, and boom — a nice $200 never ending source of entertainment. The problem was that the minute we bought the table, we found out we had a bunch of new friends; new friends who happened to love foosball and loved not chipping in for beer even more. I wish we’d had the foresight to build a table like this, because we probably would have been able to charge people to play, which would have covered the cost of the table, beer, and then some.

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Now you can have your Mii character come to life! Keep in mind that you, yourself, are the real live version of your Mii character, though. But if the thought of taking the real live version of yourself and making it into a Mii for the Nintendo Wii and then making it into a sculpture sounds intriguing to you AND you have $75 plus three to four weeks to wait around, then this, my friend, is for you.

Web site MiiSculptures.com takes a photo of your Mii character and turns it into a sculpture. It costs $75 and takes three to four weeks. They’ll also do wedding cake toppers, too, which appear to be a little bit bigger and cost $140. Ask your girlfriend if she’d be cool with Mii wedding cake toppers and if she says yes, propose immediately.

via Geekologie

Iron Man comes to us next week, and we are stoked bloggers. Sure, this isn’t a movie site, but we’ve moved beyond just gear into the CrunchLifestyle, and that includes all things awesome like Iron Man himself.

Live Science has put together a neat little gallery and run-down of real-life Iron Man-type power suits that actually exist, including the HAL and Sarcos XOS exoskeletons.

This is power armor, letting you lift heavy burdens and do other physically tiring tasks with no trouble.

Sure, they don’t look as cool as Iron Man’s armor, but then they weren’t designed by Tony Stark either.

The Swashbot will probably be the first robot to come to your house to look for living matter. Once it senses you, this four-servo robot — human-controlled now but hivemind controlled later — will call in its shock troops to blow in some fire bombs and then the Scanner-bots will come at night to check for survivors and, if you’re still huddling in a closet, allow the Swashbots to finish you off.

(via BBG)

Regular readers will note that I’m an avid fan of Opera Mini for cellphones. Most phones’ built-in browser sucks, pure and simple. While Opera Mini isn’t as good as a desktop browser, it’s still easy enough to use on a small screen that it’s a no-brainer.

When the Goog finally introduced Android, I was impressed. It’s a step in the right direction and something someone should have done awhile ago.

Now Opera is working on an Android-native version of Opera Mini, and that gets me very excited. Two great tastes that taste great together or whatever.

What’s notable is that Opera Mini usually runs on a Java virtual machine, however the Android version will run with the OS itself, meaning it’ll be faster, slimmer, and allow for more OS interoperability. That means it will rock.

Sadly, this odd platform wasn’t working today due to firmware problems. However, as you can see from the video, it’s basically a moving platform that can move in any direction without turning. You can basically turn at a 90 degree angle while moving forward and the thing runs as if it were on rails.

It’s a Segway prototype right now and can be embedded in almost any configuration, including this odd table thing that never falls over. The devices move so smoothly it’s eerie.

If you doubted the power of the iPhone’s wee processor, I dare you to download Yeti3D or 3DPacman for the iPhone. I tried them out last night and the graphics are incredibly smooth and acceptably detailed. Considering this is a completely homebrew product, I’m fairly excited for the future prospects for gaming on the platform.

What do you do when you’re an engineering student and the frat kids won’t leave you alone? What if you want to be a long-distance party animal?

You build a 1/2-scale Panzer tank that shoots cans of Red Bull, that’s what.

Once in awhile, you find something that where practicality loses out to the powerful forces of all that is awesome. this Etch-A-Sketch based clock is one perfect example. This might be the coolest thing you’ll see all day.

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