The Uno - a segway motorcycle

This is just awesome: a motorcycle which looks like a one-wheeled one (actually, it's two wheels next to each other).

Balancing things are really being the next thing, from segways to all the balancing bots I see those days.

 

By the way, I am planning to do a project on a balancing bot at the robotics club I created in my high school, either with the Lego NXT (although we don't have a gyro - yet - but we'll try with distance or light sensors), or custom made, in which case we can use my Parallax accelerometer (probably with Arduino?). I'll let you know about the project as soon as possible on my projects blog.

iPhone piano app: real multitouch! (the power of Hackers)

I recently ran across this post on Synthopia, about the iAno app for jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch. I don't have an iPhone/iTouch (yet), so I didn't try it, but although it look pretty useless (only one octave on the screen at a time), there's something that impressed when I watched the video: you can press up do 5 keys at the same time!

 

 

I heard before that the multitouch screen used in the iPhone/iPod Touch could only support up to 2 fingers simultaneously (in software), but this shows that the awesome hacking community behind all the jailbreaks and unlocks managed to hack the screen too! I wish I had an iPhone so I could try to use the non-official sdk and do some cool stuff with it, or even try to dig into the system and figure out how they hacked the box... Maybe there's some hope I'll get one sometime sooner or later :-|

Anyways, I'm pretty sure the famous SDK that Apple should be releasing this month won't allow developers to create applications using this kind of technology (that 'super-multitouch' which looks more like the videos I used to be dazzled by, bluetooth and wifi connectivity, location etc.). This is what bugs me most about Apple: they want users to be closed in a perfect world, where no one can come in and mess stuff up. But locking cool technology like that to keep security will never make the device more exciting. Hobbyists like me aren't able to mess around with such a cool device, and it's a shame. If I had an iPhone, I would totally use it to make a bool robotics platform, or some little games to have fun with. Fortunately, the hacking and the open source communities are always there to make the world a better place.

That is why I'm excited about Android, Google new mobile operating system, which is completely open, and which has an excellent SDK, allowing the use of some very innovative APIs, such as the location one, which can tell an application where the phone is located in the world, at any moment.

I am indeed working on a project for an Android-based Robotics platform, with some guys from SoR (Society of Robots) and I am discovering the SDK, which is very well made.

 

For more on Android, see here. (I love the slogan "All applications are created equal" :D )

Wiimote+Roomba=Wiimba !

This guy made a cool wiimote + roomba hack: instead of controlling the roomba with the wiimote's acceleration, as usual hacks do, he added a sensor bar to the roomba, and used the combination as a vacuum cleaner, where the wiimote is the handle. When he twists the wiimote, the roomba turns.
Even though it turns a revolutionary autonomous device into an old-style vacuum cleaner, the hack is a good one!

Arduino Audio - DAC options

uC Hobby has recently released a new article on Arduino sound, this time using DAC instead of simple on-off toggling (as they did in the previous articles).
This allows you to make more complex waves, such as sine waves or triangle waves, and you can generate more sophisticated sounds, and play polyphonic melodies.

This is definitely going to be a big help for my sound experimenting stuff (for example making better sine wavish sound to my Arduino Theremin, or improving my Propeller piano and allow it to play more than only one note at a time).

I can't wait for more great articles on sound generation! It's fun stuff!

Interview with Johnny Lee

Hacked Gadgets has an interesting interview with Johnny Lee, the creator of the coolest Wiimote hacks I've ever seen. He talks about the time finds for hobbies, the link between his field of study/research and his personal projects, about his choice of Computer Engineering rather than just Electrical Engineering or Computer Science (I actually like this choice too, since I love both EE and CS, but don't only want to do just one of them. I love the interplay of hardware and software - that's where my passion for robotics and all this human-computer interaction stuff comes from :p) and a bunch of other things.

Check it out here.

Yet another Johnny Lee wiimote trick: Virtual Reality desktop

Now that he's shown us many new ways to use the wiimote, he uses the wiimote in practice, to make a virtual reality environment on a screen, by just having the IR sensor bar on your head. It's, again, awesome!
From hackaday:

If you thought [Johnny Lee] was done making us all buy Wiimotes, you were wrong. Now he's back showing off a simple, but incredibly effective VR head tracker. He swapped out the LED's on a pair of LED light safety glasses with a set of IR LEDs and used his PC/Wiimote combo to do the work. The demo is just fantastic. As usual, you can download the software from his project page.

And here's a video:

Stupid Facebook spam chain...

On my special msn messenger email (an old hotmail account), I've got all of these 'frigtard' italian friends (more or less) who spend their Internet time forwarding dumb chains, talking about the worst stupidity on earth, especially for the ones about making you pay for hotmail. I mean, come on! It was completely losing the battle against gmail and yahoo, how could it be worth any money? (I actually like the improvements they're making with the windows live stuff, and I'm learning to like Microsoft for this and other things)

Now facebook is finally taking some of this stuff away from my mailbox with the funwall application: people send videos, messages and similar chains to all their friends. And I just got the following message:

Attention all Facebook membeRs.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you're active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.
Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

 

Wow! Now we also get 'private' messages from Zuckerberg! And what a cool language, what a great marketing strategy! Delete your users! Of course, that's totally logical. Well, it is for this girl who sent that in and believed this stupid actor... It's sad for her, and for me who get spammy shit like that.

STOP SENDING STUPID CHAINS!