Category: Technology

Carry Your Own Robotic Plane

Personal micro UAV

The craft is only 12 inches tall and weighs in at 13 pounds so I wonder what kind of loiter time could be expected from it. Still, pretty cool. One question about all this cool high tech gear the fighter of the future will will be in charge of, will they be able to use it all? With all this nifty intel gear there may be an issue of info overload or better yet what if conflict of intel. What if an attack is planned using info from a high altitude UAV and then at the last moment new photos from a backpack sized UAV shows something totally different behind the hill? If all the info doesn’t get back to the commanders in time there could be quite a mess…

The objective of the MAV ACTD is to demonstrate a backpackable, affordable, easy-to-operate, and responsive reconnaissance and surveillance system. The system will provide the small unit with militarily useful real-time combat information of difficult to observe and/or distant areas or objects.
The system will also be employable in a variety of warfighting environments (for example: in complex topologies such as mountainous terrain; heavily forested areas; confined spaces; and high concentrations of civilians).

Carry Your Own Robotic Plane

UAV, military, robots,

Mechanical Digital Laser Video Projector Project

The 5×7 LED matrix pong game is cool, but the real reason to go here is the mechanical video laser scanner!
Its a 16×16 20-30fps red monochromatic digital video projector. Kind of like what was used in the old Nintendo Virtual Boy but not as high tech.

Motor spins drum with 16 mirrors around at about 20-30 rev/second. The mirrors are tilted differently, so that they draw one line each on the screen. Rotation time is measured by the reading fork and divided by 16*32=512. This is the pixel clock. When the reading fork senses that the wire attached to the mirror drum passes, a new frame starts, and the pixel clock starts. For each pixel, the laser is turned on or off. Simple as that! Each line contains 32 pixels, but only 16 are used. The remaining 16 pixels on a line do either represent the gap between mirrors, or, they are used for calibration. Oh, yes. The calibration. I won’t be attempting that again any day soon. Each mirror is calibrated in the Y-direction by tediously moving them physically. T-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y. Did I mention that? The X-direction calibration is done with a lookup-table in software. Ahhh… software… 🙂 And there’s your picture. Making video is the easy part. That’s just a matter of changing the picture every 4 or 5 frames or so.

AVR projects

Hi to everyone who saw this on Hack-a-Day, looks like the AVR page is wilting under the load. You might want to give it a try in a day or two.
In the mean time, check this out – Laser MAME!

(Thank you Steve for this cool site)

laser, video, AVR, project, pong,

Art Interface Device

AID card

This looks to be a useful project. You take an input device (keyboard, lightpen, rocker switch, salty water) and use that to trigger whatever is attached to the AIM (motor, speaker, servo, arc welder, hammer drill…) thus giving the artist an easy way to create output in an art install or what have you. Oh yeah, its DIY and Open Source too!

The Art Interface Device (AID) is a microprocessor platform for building electronic installation art. It can also be used as an interface between such artworks and computers. It can enable artworks to respond to people and the physical environment.

AID

art, robotics, MIDI,