Author: John

Rocket Festival in Amphoe Selaphum

Rocketman

This happened back in June but it’s still pretty cool to read about. The rockets that these guys build are pretty scary. If one of those blew up near anyone there would be parts all over the place, and not just rocket parts!

I finally had the chance to witness the famous Rocket Festival, a (non-Buddhist) tradition observed only in parts of Roi-et and Yasothon provinces to ask ‘the Gods’ for rain at the start of the rainy season. The exact date and organizing villages change every year, but it is usually held on a weekend in the middle or at the end of June. Participants from around 5 or 6 villages will come together and fire their self-made rockets into the sky. This year my girlfriend’s home village was organizing the event.

Rocket Festival in Amphoe Selaphum

Nanoflyer

Nanoflyer

I thought that I had seen some small R/C flying machines before but this one is smaller than all of them. The flight time is low, but then again where the heck would a bigger battery go?

The 2.7 grams Nanoflyer is by far the smallest and lightest electric powered
contra-rotating coaxial-rotor RC helicopter ever built. It is battery powered and it
uses the Proxflyer concept to give it inherent stability. It is built to test how small
helicopters that may use the passively stable Proxflyer rotor concept.

Key specifications, components and materials used to build the small Nanoflyer:

Rotor: 85 mm (2 contra rotating 4-bladed rotors)
Carbon rod 0.3mm and 0.5 mm from WES-Technik
Aramid 30 g/m2 fabric from CST
Airframe: 80 mm long, 0.08 mm carbon plate, 0.3mm rod
Brass bearings 0.7 mm from Didel
Motors (x2): 4 x 8 mm, 28 ohm from Didel
Battery: 1 x 3.7 V, 20 mAh Kokam cell
Control: 2 channels IR control with 2x ESC
Yaw control by differential speed of rotors
C.G. trimed forward for horizontal flight
2.7 grams (incl. battery and control)
Weight: 2.7 grams (incl. battery and control)
Flight time: Up to 1 minute, (0.5 minute continues)

Nanoflyer

mini, helecopter, R/C, cool

RoBoCup 2005

robot

Its that time again, I was puttering around on the MAKE blog today and noticed that the RoBoCup expo was going on. What is RoBoCup you ask?

But what is RoBoCup exactly? It’s a competition between small robots from a number of universities or manufacturers. There are two main themes: an obstacle course and a football game. The last one seemed to be the most popular (we recommend the Aibo football game). There was also a small booth with the latest in cybernetics.

There, that’s it in a nut shell. Yet another reason to go visit Japan. Osaka would be mighty fine this time of year…

RoBoCup 2005

cybernetics, technology, robotics, Japan

Wiggler

I enjoy taking stereo photographs from time to time but many people have a problem viewing them. People either can’t cross their eyes or they can’t do the ‘far look’ thing and fuse the images together. Viewers are great – but they don’t do all that well over the Internet and most people don’t have setups to view them on their computer screens anyway.
So this could be a handy tool. What the Wiggler does is take two photos (or one side by side photo) and adds a sense of the third dimention by alternating them back and forth. Its pretty cool. I have a link at the bottom to an image that I made from two screens from the Google Earth program.

Wiggler

Lower Manhattan has been Wiggled!

wiggle, stereo, photography, 3D