Sparki - The Easy Robot for Everyone! by ArcBotics — Kickstarter
We're partnering with MiniBloq to bring Drag-and-Drop programming to Sparki! Easy robot programming, bringing the age range down to elementary, and opens robotics to whole new group of future roboticists.
More info at: Sparki - The Easy Robot for Everyone! by ArcBotics — Kickstarter
RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet!
Another cool robot from RobotGrrl.
Buddy 4000 Your Fun Robot!
A classy robot chassis designed to express robot emotions with an artistic flair
More info at: RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet!
A cool video of some awesome robots by Jack Conte.
More info at: Site of J. Edgar Park
#adafruit6secs - The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival
The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! #adafruit6secs
Call For Entries: Announcing The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! Share your cool project in 6 seconds of video and win up to \$600 at the Adafruit store, with six runners up winning \$60 store credit each. In a 6 second video, we want you to share the best project you've made. Be sure not to use any copyrighted music, video, etc. This should be all your project, all by you. The Adafruit team will be looking on Twitter, G+/youtube and beyond for Vines, 6 second videos and more tagged with #adafruit6secs. The deadline is 6pm ET, 5/6/13. The Adafruit team of judges will pick their favorites and announce the winner on May, 12th at 6pm ET.
tl;dr - Post a 6 second video of your electronic project(s) using Vine on Twitter and tag it #adafruit6secs !
Keep reading for all the details!
More info at: #adafruit6secs - The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival
Lego's Mindstorms EV3 programmable robots have character - YouTube
The next generation of Lego's programmable robotics kit is teaches kids how to program, but also offers something for adult enthusiasts.
More info at: Lego's Mindstorms EV3 programmable robots have character - YouTube
HowStuffWorks "How Robots Work"
On the most basic level, human beings are made up of five major components:
A body structure
A muscle system to move the body structure
A sensory system that receives information about the body and the surrounding environment
A power source to activate the muscles and sensors
A brain system that processes sensory information and tells the muscles what to do
Why your 8-year-old should be coding | VentureBeat
April 12, 2013 9:01 AM Jolie O'Dell
Learn-to-code startups abound these days, but one in particular is focusing on the very young and is having some success in elementary schools around the country — even underserved schools with no budgets for STEM but a great need for better tools.
[The startup is ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}Tynker[; it makes a ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}web-based learning platform and a visual programming language[ for teachers and kids in K-12 classrooms. In a discussion with its co-founder, we found out why ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}[[teaching ]{.kLink style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: none; background-color: transparent; width: auto !important; float: none !important; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; position: static;"}[kids]{.kLink style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: none; background-color: transparent; width: auto !important; float: none !important; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; position: static;"}]{style="outline: none medium; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; position: static; color: #1f81e5;"}[ how to code is so important to him.]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}[
]{style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}
Welcome to the new home of d11.me. I have moved the Url to robotcraft.org and hopefully everything has transferred successfully. You will need to reregister to make a new comment and you will need to update the RSS feeds. Thanks for putting up with the confusion.
Doug
The world just keeps on changing. Never bet against it.
Fraser Speirs - Blog - Teaching Programming with iOS and Amazon EC2
I just shut down the Amazon EC2 instance we've been using all school year, so I thought it was worth reflecting on. Last August, I wrote about my new approach to teaching Ruby programming on our iPads.
How did it work? In a word: perfectly.
When Did Intelligent Life Emerge in the Universe? » A Curious Mind
Figure 1. The Helix Nebula; the gaseous outer layers expelled by a dying star. The ejected material enriches the interstellar medium (from which new stars and planets form) with carbon. Credit: NASA, ESA, C. R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), M. Meixner and P. McCullough (STScI).
Observations from the ground and with the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the cosmic rate of birth of new stars reached its peak some 9–10 billion years ago, and it has been declining ever since. The peak in the universal rate of carbon production lags behind the cosmic star-formation rate by no more than about a billion years. Consequently, we can guess that if the universe did indeed experience a burst of life-formation, similar perhaps (in terms of its eruptive nature) to the Cambrian explosion on Earth, the earliest this might have happened was about 9 billion years ago.
It took life on Earth about three billion years to develop from primitive to complex. We have no idea if this is “typical,” but it seems reasonable to assume that if “intelligent” life develops at all, this process should take a few billion years, given the rather slow pace of Darwinian-like evolution. This means that we might expect “intelligent” (more cautiously, “complex”) life forms to have emerged in abundance in the universe some 5–6 billion years ago. If true, then there could be quite a few civilizations out there that are more advanced than ours by a few billions of years. How is that for a humbling thought?
Announcing LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 04/01/2013 Coming Fall 2013: LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Create and command robots that do what you want.
With LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 you can turn your LEGO creations into live robots that follow your every command. The new LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 set includes everything you need – motors, sensors, programmable brick, 550+ LEGO Technic elements, remote control – to create and command robots of even your wildest imagination, including 5 cool robot characters. Download the 3D building instructions and the app to command your robot via your smart device. Then program your robots to walk, talk, move and do whatever you want them to do to via the intuitive software program, the programmable brick or your smart device.
Now we are getting somewhere. This is really cool.
Dynamic Robot Manipulation – Brick throwing robot « adafruit industries blog
BigDog handles heavy objects. The goal is to use the strength of the legs and torso to help power motions of the arm. This sort of dynamic, whole-body approach is routinely used by human athletes and animals, and will enhance the performance of advanced robots. The control techniques and actuators needed for dynamic manipulation are being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the Army Research Laboratory’s RCTA program.
The ultimate robot!
Oreo Separator Machine #1 « adafruit industries blog
A detailed look into the complex world of Oreo separation- featuring music by my band, Anamanaguchi
Cool new way to program the NXT. Will have to follow this to see how it turns out...
Enchanting : Enchanting : Enchanting
What is Enchanting?
Enchanting is a tool to allow children an easy-to-understand way to program LEGO MINDSTORMS NXTrobots. It is based on Scratchand BYOB/Snap!, and powered by leJOS NXJ(Java for the NXT). Enchanting is free and open-source.
For more details, see the About page. Is it any good?
Yes! But, don't take my word for it. See what people are saying about Enchanting.
How do I use it?
Try out our brand new Enchanting Cards! (Here is a preliminary German translation.)
Your other best resource at this time, aside from diving in and trying it out, is the interactive book Robotics with Enchanting and LEGO® NXT: A Project Based Introduction to Programming, available for the iPad or as an interactive PDF for use on your computer. (Please note that we've re-arranged the order of the palettes and changes the 'motor' blocks' colour from red to cyan).
Knowing how to use Scratchis certainly helpful, and, for the advanced user, look at how to use BYOB/Snap, especially the BYOB manual.
I just backed a Kickstarter project!
Next Generation LiveCode (Open Source) by RunRev Ltd — Kickstarter
LiveCode is like a next generation version of HyperCard. It is used to create #1 one app store apps, real-time flight booking systems and control satellites. It is used to create simple one off apps and utilities to solve day-to-day problems.
There are some things it can’t do – yet. This project is to create a next-generation LiveCode.
Our vision is that this new next-generation LiveCode will be free and open source.
It will run on every popular platform and device.
It will let you write programs in English.
And by being open, its English language programming will be extensible to any computing problem out there. That's a world first.
If you couldn’t code before, LiveCode is the answer. If you’ve used the existing version of LiveCode before and it didn’t do everything you needed, this next-generation version has you covered.
Can't wait to see Mark Frauenfelder at the science museum next week!
Celebrity Lecture Series | Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
February 28, 2013 Mark Frauenfelder The Maker Movement – 7 pm Adult \$12 Children (2-12)/Senior (65+) \$10.00
Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine, the leading publication of the do-it-yourself movement, and the founder of the popular Boing Boing blog, which has over five million unique visitors per month. He is the former editor-in-chief of Wired online, and was an editor at Wired magazine and Wired Books from 1993-1998. He has appeared on The Colbert Report and The Martha Stewart Show, and has written for New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Business Week, The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and other national publications.
Hans is the 'old man' of the group. He tends to be nervous and is often indecisive. Hans frequently changes his mind, and is a little fidgety (he oscillates) when he's not moving around. He is very meticulous and precise in other ways; Hans does not like to compromise, preferring to be in a steady state until a dramatic change is called for. Hans speaks with the voice of a kindly old man with a Swiss-German accent, though his voice can become more nasally when he's upset or feels strongly about something. His catchphrase is "maybe so, but perhaps not."
About the 555: The 555 timer IC was designed by Hans Camenzind in 1971. It consists of two threshold triggers, an RS flip-flop, and an output buffer. The 555 provides an easy, reliable way to create rectangular waveforms of adjustable pulse width and frequency by using different external component values.
Review: Marware Axis and MicroShell Folio iPad mini cases | 9to5Mac
Marware, one of the leading accessory makers for Apple’s mobile devices, has sent us two of their latest iPad mini cases for review. Both cases are unique in their own right, but both are built with versatility and quality materials. Check our reviews of both the Marware Axis and Marware MicroShell Folio cases for the iPad mini below.
Posted on December 6, 2012 by RobotGrrl
Last night was the final countdown for the RoboBrrd Indiegogo campaign, we surpassed our stretch goal!
Big thanks to all the new and old friends of RoboBrrd, for backing the project and/or spreading the word!
We will be keeping everyone in the loop as to what is happening, and we will be posting pics and vids of the behind the scenes action on twitter/facebook/g , so you can follow RoboBrrd!
If you have any questions about RoboBrrd feel free to ask them!
It is extremely exciting to be able to get RoboBrrd in the hands of even more people now. I can’t wait to see what people will be making with them!
YIPEE WOOT WOOT CHIRP CHIRP BEEP BLOOP WHIRR SQUAWK!
Thanks again!
This post was originally posted on RobotGrrl.com
Tags: 2012, awesome, campaign, crowdfunding, fun, funded, indiegogo, robobrrd, woot
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via robobrrd.com
Congratulations to RoboBrrd for making their funding goal!
via adafruit.com
That's one amazing robot!
From Discovery Bad Astronomy Blog
[This is truly astonishing: the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped what may turn out to be the Space Picture of the Year: Curiosity descending to Mars under its parachutes!]{style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"}
The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that’s been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently – and perfectly – touch down on the surface mere minutes later.
The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don’t let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we’re curious – that’s when we’re at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn’t divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.
It’s what we can do, and what we must do.
Finally getting around to turning on iTunes match. I only have about 4,000 songs in my library. It will be interesting to see how many match their database.
