NeatTrix

…make me some pancakes.  Rosie the robot’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother shows off her laundry folding skills. Something to note: the video says 50x which means this 2 minute video took one hour 40 min to film.

The first Kindle active content, ie applications and games, have started to appear.  The first offerings, released this week,  are two similar games, both free, and are available to Kindle users through the Kindle Store (link below).

The games are Every Word, and Shuffled row.  They both involve creating words from a set of letters.  In Every Word, you are given six or seven letter and then have to find every word you can using those letters. Your attempts are checked against the dictionary.  In Shuffled row, you are also given a set of letters, but in this game,  letters are constantly being added and removed adding an element of strategy to the game.

Hopefully, more and more games will start to show up now that Amazon has opened the gates. Then maybe they’ll let me try and make something.

http://www.amazon.com/s?_encoding=UTF8&search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Amazon%20Digital%20Services

UPDATE – I noticed a few days ago that Every Word was no longer available for download.  I guessed it might have something to do with some potentially offensive (not to mention illegitimate) words that I noticed while playing the game.  Amazon is apparently working on fixing this and will release an updated version of the game soon.

Or Roboplow rather.  This is awesome. I’m always looking for new ways to get snow off my driveway.  I like the remote control, but something autonomous would be cool too.

The Wiimote controlling drum machines, by which I mean, machines that play the drums. A quick read of his website tells me that he’s using Arduinos to control the machines, plus some custom stuff. Pretty nice.

NeatTools (an open-source project I work on) is finally (thanks to me) getting some documentation and media, out there on the web.  It’s early days yet, but there is a new wiki and a YouTube Channel both with growing amounts of information.  Here’s the first video to get you started:

In February, Amazon is having a limited beta for the Kindle Development Kit, which will allow development of third-party applications for the kindle.    There is very little information about it at the moment, but they do say this

Voice over IP functionality, advertising, offensive materials, collection of customer information without express customer knowledge and consent, or usage of the Amazon or Kindle brand in any way are not allowed. In addition, active content must meet all Amazon technical requirements, not be a generic reader, and not contain malicious code.

I can think of a few dozen useful things I’d like to see right off the bat, although I’m sure if you thought about it you could think of a few of your own.

http://www.amazon.com/kdk/

Leave it up to the DOD folks to come up with something this clunky looking, but it probably has to work in an antarctic blizzard for a week. Maybe it will also take your blood pressure. It weighs more than 1.4 pounds. For more info see: mg.gpsworld.com/gpsmg/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=585209&sk=dbd3a08638a646801b63459d685fc5b7

It’s not synthetic speech, but Floyd Bell, Inc. (www.floydbell.com) has a new series of alarms that play a pre-recorded audio message of up to 10 seconds when activated. That sure beats a simple beep, honk, etc. The alarms operate at 12 VDC.

The downside is that the audio is pre-recorded at the factory, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to alter the message yourself. Well, no documented way. It might be nice if the device to support multiple “tracks” within the alloted 10 second audio capacity. The picture shows two separate standard audio messages, not one, and not two warnings from the exact same alarm. Also, the frequency characteristics favor telephone-quality audio. That is, spoken audio.

A good idea, but not quite “there” yet.

Bell Lab’s demonstrated their first attempt to synthesize a human voice at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City with the Voder, and the attempt was rather an impressive one.  The quality of human voice replication hasn’t progressed much further until just a couple decades ago.  It did have it’s drawbacks however.  For one, it require a specially trained operator needing a year of training to master the complicated coordination of keys and pedals. (continue reading…)

Ground-mobile robots expend most of their available power just being mobile. Being able to negotiate complicated terrain, or even stairs, adds complexity to mechanics and the programming. Motor noise makes stealthy operation nearly impossible while the robot is in motion.

Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog (www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog), for example, can carry a large payload (400 lbs), and is impressively nimble. The video also demonstrates that the Big Dog is not very fast (4 mph), and is quite loud (like a million angry bees), because of the gasoline engine needed to power it. It also looks weird (maybe because there’s no identifiable head?).

Why not just use big dogs?

(continue reading…)

Just when you thought your boss couldn’t get any more annoying.  Enter the micro-manager’s dream come true.  Not to be tied down by simply spying on you from strategically hidden camera and microphones, key loggers, and straight up reading your emails, they now have the ability to roam the halls of your office searching for ways to justify their paychecks, at least to themselves. (continue reading…)

Lucky, the German Shepherd, is truly lucky. He’s going to get a nice, warm place to sleep…outside, where he belongs. When he gets tired of watching the buffalo roam (Seriously, there’s a herd of buffalo nearby), and chasing rabbits he’ll have a warm retreat from the snow, ice, freezing rain, not-so-freezing rain, fog, drizzle, snizzle, and 40 other kinds of precipitation that only maybe the Inuit have proper words for, and which try our souls practically every day. Right now, there’s like 3 feet of global warming in the yard, and another foot or so due in the next 36 hours.

The intent is to build Lucky a doghouse controller with a Bluetooth connection. The controller will regulate a heating pad, sense Lucky’s presence in the doghouse, measure temperatures inside and outside the doghouse, automatically dispense food, and maybe control some lights or a fan (we have occasional summer weather). We’ll have the capacity to add other features. The Bluetooth connection gives us the ability to monitor Lucky’s use of his house and remotely change operational parameters. Eventually, we’ll take Lucky’s house off the grid, and convert the power source to wind and/or solar.

Stay tuned for further developments. We’re going to do this in installments, mostly from things we have lying around.