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.

Lumino is an concept for interacting with touch screen computer in 3D. With a system of glass-fiber-filled objects, Lumino is able to discern the particular block, or stack of blocks and modify the output accordingly. So it not only knows what’s sitting on it surface, it knows what’s sitting on top of that. Check it out.

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:

These guys have come up with a really neat 3D electrostatic or E-field mouse. The whole thing is a few chips with a PIC microcontroller (one with USB support) as the brain. The big brains at the MIT Media Lab had a smaller implementation going in 1998 (MIT Media Lab Device Video and web page). Still, pretty damn neat.

3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.

In keeping with the recent “green” theme, here’s Botanicalls (botanicalls.com), a device that senses soil moisture in a potted plant, and then send you an e-mail or voice message when it needs water. This device is sold as a kit and is available from a number of sources including Adafruit (adafruit.com; http://neattrix.com/?p=175) for around $100.
(continue reading…)

We’ve looked at brain interfaces before (Emotiv Headset). This article looks at a different technique.

If you’ve ever happened to cover the end of a small flashlight with your thumb in a darkened room, you’ve probably noticed that your skin is remarkably transparent to red light. You may have also noticed a periodic darkening of your glowing thumb in synchrony with your heat beat. In broad strokes, that’s the principal by which the finger pulse monitors (plethysmographs) work. It works even better at near infrared wavelengths. Oxygenated blood and deoxygenated blood have maximum absorbances at different wavelengths. By alternating wavelengths, measuring the absorbance, and doing some math,  you can calculate the oxygen saturation of the blood. And that’s a pulse oximeter.

Researchers have long used blood flow in specific areas of the brain as an indicator of brain activity in that region. The principle is sound: increased neural activity requires lots of energy and oxygen, and that results in greater local blood flow. Researchers used to measure blood flow with magnetic sensors, but now use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and similar imaging techniques, some of which measure glucose uptake more directly.

OK, now combine the two ideas and you might come up with something like Tom Chau, et al did at the University of Toronto. They used IR emitters and detectors to decode subjects’ preference for one beverage or another with 80% accuracy. It’s a start.

For more information:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090210092730.htm
www.physorg.com/news153472589.html
www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/10/new-brain-scan-technique-uses-ir-detecting-headband
www.bioe.psu.edu/NMR/pdf_files/2005/enrico.pdf
www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/aslin/pdfs/Aslin_Mehler2005.pdf

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…)

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.

I have, from time to time, ideas about inventions that need to be invented. As I have little to no technical ability, I don’t invent them and the world is a sadder, darker place for it.

This one came to me in the car the other day.  I was thinking about headphones.  The great advantage of headphones is of course, their ability to provide a solitary listening experience.  You can hear whatever it is without the distracting noises, and conversely others aren’t bothered by the crap you listen to. (continue reading…)