In this day and age, you most likely have a bunch of old electronics lying around — namely computer parts — that you can’t justify throwing away because they still work fine, but you can’t usually sell back or trade in because outdated computer parts don’t have much of a use. So, unless you’re a whiz with DIY electronics projects, you probably wish you could think of something better to do with all of your old computers and devices. A new Kickstarter project feels your pain, and though the campaign won’t come clean up your closets, it aims to provide everyone with a fun kit to build cute little robot models out of discarded electronic components.

The project, created by a group of programmers and engineers, aims to — in their words — make art fun for engineers. The D.Bug Model Kits make models of robots, rather than robots that utilize the electronics to, for example, walk around. So, builders can focus more on building a pretty, shiny figurine instead of worrying about making parts functions.

The project boasts its own lore as well: bugs run rampant in computers, so by building them and “trapping” them in a jar that comes with each model, you’re quarantining the bug, keeping it away from your precious workstation.

For a minimum pledge of $35, you’ll receive one of the three offered kits — the Watch Dog model — which seems super casual about being trapped inside a jar for the rest of its life.

For a pledge of $125, you’ll receive one each of the three model kits. Each kit comes with the display case, instructions, all of the necessary electronic components, and decals. If you pony up in-theme pledges in the thousands — $1,337 or $3,141 — you’ll receive prebuilt models set in their own dioramas.

The kits are put together through the magic of soldering, so you’ll need your own iron, as they’re not included.

“This is all great,” you think to yourself, “but what am I going to do with my closet full of old computers?” The D.Bug team is currently looking into ways to recycle old, discarded parts into the kits. As of now, they haven’t figured out the best way to do so while maintaining the robots pristine, shiny aesthetic.

Now read:  Take a look at this mechanical paper model robot

Article source: Article Source

The post Create legendary robot battles from old electronics appeared first on .

The game that redefined tower defense RTS on the desktop, iOS, and Android is back, and way better than before.

There’s a small but dedicated group of gamers out there that can’t get enough of Tower Defense games. When you find a good one, you can lose entire days to the puzzles found within these games that pull off tying together strategy, resource management, and a little action to form a complete package.

Anomaly: Warzone Earth took a unique approach to the genre, where you acted as the invading force instead of the defending towers. The story put you at the head of a military squad trying to defend Earth from an invading force, and while it was a simple game it was deeply entertaining. The simplicity of the game controls made it easy to port to iOS and Android, and the game significantly more popular overnight. Now, 11bit Studios returns you to the battlefield with Anomaly 2.

Visually, everything about Anomaly 2 is greatly improved. The video cut scenes, the actual gameplay, and even the surprise ending to the tutorial really suck you into the game. You’ll find new units to play with, including morphing units that allow you to be a little more flexible about your strategies between long range and short range fighting. Despite these sweeping enhancements, the core gameplay is identical. You get the same high energy game that relies on quick decisions and long term planning at the same time, with the same complex puzzles that made the first game so enjoyable.

We failed to defend Earth, and what’s left of the Human race is spread out and far too busy scavenging to actually fight. What little bit of military force remaine is now trying to fight its way towards a last-ditch effort to remove this alien force once and for all.

It’s not exactly a unique story, but the basic plot to Anomaly 2 lends itself well to the kind of gameplay that made the game so popular. You plot your course through burned out buildings and broken highways, attacking any alien force that happens to be camping out to reach your end goal. If you’re a fan of the Anomaly storyline, it is well worth the playthrough to see how it all pans out. The big feature in Anomaly 2 for most gamers probably isn’t the single player, but a killer new multiplayer that pits tower defender against invading force.

If you’ve got a friend who is also a fan of Tower Defense games, you can play one-on-one games across a handful of maps where you are either Humanity or the alien force. If you’re playing the assaulting force, there’s not really anything different about the game. If you’re playing the aliens, you’ll find that most of the controls are similar, but the gameplay is very much like a traditional Tower Defense game. If you’ve been paying attention to the game so far and know how to use the alien turrets, the back and forth inspired by this multiplayer mode becomes a great deal of fun.

Anomaly 2 is available through Steam for Mac, PC, and Linux. Multiplayer functions flawlessly across each of these platforms, and if you grab the game before May 22 you can get 20% off the full price. The game retains a lot of its simple gameplay, so it’s entirely likely that we’ll see an iOS and Android version of Anomaly 2 before long. For $15, even if you picked up two and forced a friend to try it, you can’t go wrong with this sequel.

Now read: Chrome Experiment multiplayer racing game works across 5 devices, no downloads required

Article source: Article Source

The post Review: Anomaly 2 is a worthy sequel in every way appeared first on .

The third annual Red Bull Creation event has boiled down to six finalists, and each of them is just as great as the next.

In a couple of weeks, six teams will gather in Brooklyn, NY for a 72-hour competition to build something involving a custom-made, Arduino-controllable board made by Red Bull. The “Turbull Encabulator” has to be involved in the project in some critical way, and the winning team gets $10,000. This is the Red Bull Creation contest, and for the last couple of years it has spawned a ton of absolutely silly-yet-incredible inventions from makers and hackers all over the world. The six finalists for the event this year, chosen from hundreds of YouTube submissions, had one rule — to make something awesome with LEDs.

The Sky Striker

A futuristic take on the classic “ring the bell” strongman game, this creation shoots a beam of light up a 40-foot glowing tower after striking the pad with the foam hammer. The logic board in this glowing contraption calculates the force of the strike and uses it to measure how high to shoot the light. If you reach the top, the whole tower starts pulsing colors. Everything about this project looks and feels handmade, which is part of what makes it so amazing.

The RainbowTron

This Creation uses infrared-sensitive tiles to create a large touch board, which in turn allows the user to create a musical beat by assigning different colors to the various places along the grid. The end result is a fun board that lets anyone who walks up to it create their own basic repeating beat. This project took significantly longer than 72 hours to build and demonstrate, but it’s pretty clear this team has the technical knowledge to pull off something fun.

Let there be Light

Using a coffee shop, the Turbull Encabulator, and doppler radar detectors, the Maker Twins turned a street corner into an interactive video art display in Phoenix, AZ. As people passed by the shop on the night this was demonstrated, interactive videos would be projected onto the coated glass windows and show everything from dogs, to swimming people, to giant hands. Judging from their video, this team is really big on presentation and likes to have a lot of fun.

99 (Red Bull)oons

With a quadcopter, programmable LEDs, and a ton of balloons, team 1.21 Jigawatts made a slightly-heavier-than-air craft that knows when it is about to hit the ground. When it gets close, the entire craft will start pulsing colors to simulate a hot air balloon being filled with hot air, and the quadcopter will kick in, saving it from touching the ground. As long as it has power and doesn’t crash into anything that could damage the balloons, this machine will keep itself in the air.

Persistence

Last year’s finalists MB Labs added a Raspberry Pi to their Turbull Encabulator along with some UV LEDs to make a web-aware light printer they call Persistence. The 6-foot robotic arm paints UV light on a phosphorescent canvas by rotating all the way around the center of the wall. The individual LEDs turn on and off to draw the image on the canvas, which will be all but faded before the next pass by the wand. For the presentation, the developers opened their website and a live cam to show users that they could draw whatever they wanted and have it show up on the wall.

Tic Tac Whoah

If you’ve ever played Tic-tac-toe on a massive board of any kind, or even just drawn it with massive symbols in the sand, it can be deeply satisfying. North Street Labs decided to make a board that you could walk across and play by stomping on large red buttons for the selection you wanted to make. Each player is assigned their own color at the beginning of the game, and the lines in between the board will pulse and glow when a winner is decided. It’s an incredibly polished creation, done well enough that multiple adults can walk across the board and play the game safely.

The final contest will be held on June 12, and whichever of these six teams has the best project at the end of that 72-hour contest is sure to have assembled something incredibly cool for all of us to enjoy.

Now read: Arduino launches its first robot kit complete with wheels

Article source: Article Source

The post Check out the finalists for the 2013 Red Bull Creation event appeared first on .

Article source: Article Source

The post What if the Starship Enterprise fought the Death Star over San Francisco? appeared first on .

Article source: Article Source

The post New transparent adhesive stays red for 3 minutes for easy application appeared first on .

Article source: Article Source

The post 2.6 billion-year-old water found hidden below Canada could mean water and life still on Mars appeared first on .

Think it’s hard to move a few small balls around with Lego? You have no idea. This contraption uses 3,000 parts and just a single motor to cycle balls through a continuous, incredibly complex, Lego loop.

As we’ve noted in the past, the Great Ball Contraption is just about the greatest feat of Lego engineering that there is. The combination of planning, ingenuity, and commitment required to put together a truly excellent Great Ball Contraption (GBC), is well beyond that level of even dedicated Lego fans. Philip Verbeek, whose past GBC work has been covered by Geek.com, is back with another incredible creation.

Verbeek’s GBC 6 is an entirely new design, featuring 7 custom GBC modules and just a single Lego motor. There are also three servos and an emergency stop push sensor.

Verbeek explained each of the contraptions components to us. He noted that the GBC 6 uses the following GBC modules:

1. Lift (Gallery picture 4): Lifts the balls.
2. Automatic labyrinth (picture 5, 18): Moves in four directions to lead the balls to the exit.
3. Stop-go mechanism 1 (picture 6, 16): Stops balls and let them go by at the right time. This prevents those balls that would come through while the “Stop arm” is down.
4. Stop arm (picture 7): Waits until 8 balls have filled the arm, then the arm moves down and the balls exit.
5. Pick-and-place robot (picture 8, 9, 10, 11, 12): Picks the balls up at a low level and places them at a higher level.
6. Horizontal lift (picture 13, 14, 17): Moves the balls from A to B by a tray. This tray is always horizontal by the mechanism.
7. Swing mechanism: By making the swing going in the right phase, the balls will come out at the end of the swing.
8. Push-up mechanism (picture 15): Pushes balls to a higher level.

Clearly, the star of the show is the pick-and-place machine. This isn’t the typical, chip-installing pick-and-place robot, but it’s the next best thing. The mechanical arm is able to pick up multiple balls at once and transport them to another mechanism in a way that, while not as elegant as some other GBC designs, is incredibly cool.

To me, the most clever parts of this GBC weren’t the pick-and-place arm or the maze table, but the swing arm (seen at 2:18 in the video) and the pitch-fork style ball collector (at 2:12). These mechanisms make great use of the bricks and rely less on NXT and motors, and more on good, old fashioned Lego ingenuity.

If you’d like to support Verbeek’s project you can visit his site or vote up his GBC on Cuusoo.

Now read: Ridiculously complicated Xbox 360 Lego disc-changer slightly simplifies your life

• Picture 01

  

• Picture 02

  

• Picture 03

  

• The Lift

  

• Automatic labyrinth

  

• Stop-go mechanism 001

  

• Stop arm mechanism

  

• Pick-and-place robot

  

• Pick-and-place robot

  

• Pick-and-place robot

  

• Pick-and-place robot

  

• Pick-and-place robot

  

• Horizontal lift mechanism

  

• Horizontal lift mechanism

  

• Picture 15

  

• Stop-go mechanism 001

  

• Picture 17

  

• Automatic labyrinth

  

• Picture 19

  

Article source: Article Source

The post Lego contraption moves balls with maximum complexity and awesomeness appeared first on .

Article source: Article Source

The post School experiment discovers garden cress won’t germinate near a router appeared first on .

Article source: Article Source

The post Arduino launches its first robot kit complete with wheels appeared first on .

Article source: Article Source

The post Google plans to release Glass SDK for native apps appeared first on .