Category: Fun

Drone racing simulator


“Drone Racing is a new high speed competitive racing sport. Skilled pilots fly quad-copter drones through three-dimensional courses at speeds up to 120mph. DRL drones are custom built for speed, agility, and performance. Pilots steer from the point of view of the drone by wearing First Person View (FPV) goggles that display a live image transmitted by an onboard camera. Flying a drone competitively at high speed in FPV is an intense, immersive experience.”

Sound like fun? Think you have the reflexes to compete against 20 somethings? I sure don’t! But don’t despair, you can play the DRL drone sim for free! 

DRL Simulator (free beta)

How to Get the Most From Your Toy Airplane

Remember when we would play with those little balsa wood planes and try to tweak them for better flights? Well this guy has pretty much taken that to a whole new level. I love the attention to detail like giving the wings more lift by warping them with water and an Ace bandage. The video of his flight makes it well worth the effort.

Flying and Improving Your Guillow’s Sky Streak

 

Instagram Socialmatic Camera

 

A pretty cool looking concept camera (sadly, not real) that brings the Instagram look and feel into the real world. Sounds like a pretty spiffy camera if they could pull it off. 16GB storage, optical zoom, Wifi and bluetooth. Even sports a four ink printer that prints your modded filtered masterpiece onto Instagram branded paper. Something along the lins of Zink I suspect.I hope that this gets made, kind of doubt it but I do expect to see some iPhone cases that look like this any day now.

Instagram Socialmatic Camera | Highsnobiety.com.

Bonzart Ampel Digital TLR Camera From Japan

Bonzart Ampel

This looks like an amazing little toy camera that hardly deserves the title of ‘toy’. There won’t be a hipster photog worth their Holga that won’t be beating back their fellows with up-cycled seat belt camera straps when this gem hits the market. This 5 mega pixel twin lend digital camera boasts a 2 inch LCD screen in a waist level viewfinder, multiple artistic shooting modes (B&W, sepia,vivid, high contrast…), a real ’tilt-shift’ lens in addition to a regular lens so you can make things look tiny, magnet rings for adding other lenses or physical filters, and runs on AA batteries! All this and more for around $180 USD (14,700 JPY) Oh, it will also take videos.

USB beans and yet another ‘toy’ camera

Bonz.jp (Makers page in Japanese)

Gajetdaisuke (Japanese page but well worth to translate)

Flickr user Jet Daisuke has more photos of the camera!

Mech Warfare


Imagine that you are the pilot of a six story high walking battle machine that is armed to the teeth. Your mission is to destroy the opposing force that has put dibs on your beloved city. As you turn a corner down a deserted street a rocket arcs towards you and you let fly a volley of machine gun fire at the six legged mech that fired it. Well, thats kind of what happens in ‘MechWarfare‘, a young sport where roboticists use sophisticated off the shelf wireless technology to give themselves the point of view of their remote controlled creations. Oh, did I mention they they are armed? Fully auto 6mm AirSoft guns are common and in the heavy class they use unguided rockets and flamethrowers! How can this not be the most fun you can have with r/c robots? Go read the article and see if you have what it takes to become the mech fighter of the future! Heck, if you want to help out you can drop them a few bucks in their Kickstarter Project, they want to build a better arena.

[via Slashdot]

Roboticists Engage in Mech Combat to Hone Their Skills