The guys at Shropshire Linux User Group have been busy designing boxes to put your Rasberry Pi in. Well, that is if  you are lucky enough to have one. I don’t think I am far enough along the queue to get to place an order yet  Damn I want so bad, I want one more than I wanted Lego when I was (twenty)8.

I am sure we will be cutting a few of these on our laser in the coming year!

 If this can be made accurate, anything can

Something I have realised is that there are no good open source robot arms in existence. Sure there are have been a few attempts (Oomlout,  TROBOT (kickstarter) but these are toy scale robot arms. What researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs need are arms of similar specifications to those used in factories. Unfortunately those kind of arms start at £10k and go up to £120k and beyond.

Now a common fallacy in build-it-yourself projects is cost savings. There are very real reasons why industrial arms cost so much. They are precision engineered, made out of cast iron and use very powerful actuators. The high cost is attributable to the quality of the engineering used to achieve a strength and accuracy specification. However I think I have a shortcut to precision.

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March music night once again was busy with some familiar and new visitors dropping by during the evening. Jelly was a predominant theme of the night, with James of Madlab & Matt bringing along Jelly Theremin and Drum kit. Andrew K and Tom H unveiled a project they had been working on together, a single string instrument built using a length of knitted conductive fabric. Gary brought along several OLPC laptops to demonstrate their musical abilities and for everybody to play with.  Tom L was coding something with a microphone connected to a laptop that reacted to singing and similar sounds!

Thanks to Anne Suss for the videos

Magnification of Conductive Thread

One of my friends is part of a team that developed an online pixel art drawing program. Its getting a lot of traffic these days with nearly 30,000 drawings uploaded. Interestingly he says one of the largest traffic drivers is a drawing of the Minecraft pick axe. If you google image search for Minecraft axe, Piq is the number 1 hit.

Anyway I thought I would share it with Edinburgh Hacklab people because its an Edinburgh team, its retro (being pixel art), and has tenuous links to Minecraft, our favourite Indy game. The pixel art application is pretty slick too, all written in javascript, with useful tools such as automatic mirroring of axis, adjustable pixel size and dynamic palettes. The quality of the top artists on there is fairly mind blowing too.

Enjoy

John Alexander at the Shropshire Linux User Group (SLUG) has been busy with an arduino compatible IO extension board for the Raspberry PI. It looks like a very nice way for getting the Raspberry PI to control low level peripheries. Nice PCB milling too! Now if only I could get my hands on a damn Raspberry PI! (looks like they haven’t managed to get one too :/ )

Keep up the good work John

From one of the premier robot labs, UPenn, comes some mad music generation. Quadcopters performing James Bond theme tune. Urgh, that’s so awesome it hurts me. Seems like the batteries could not last the whole piece though :p. 2M hits so far, further confirming the only thing people want robots to do is entertain us, becuase they are so damn good at it.

The hottest Friday night in Edinburgh, our monthly music event returned last week for more of the best in eccentric homebrew action. We saw Andrew Kieran’s fabric potentiometers – hand-woven cloths designed to behave as electronic components – being used to control sequencers and to drive synths.

Andrew was good enough to explain some of the technology behind his creation, though sadly my phone was not up to the job of videoing much. Tom Hardiment demoed his arc tweeter, a speaker that emits sound by modulating a high-voltage electrical arc.

Also, Ioann Maria brought a nostalgia trip in the form of an old Amiga 600 with Protracker in the disk drive. Naturally, after we’d worked out how to make it make noises we had to wire this to the arc tweeter. Tom Larkworthy wrote a whole set of strange and wonderful vocal modulations in SuperCollider.

A good time was had by all, the next one is on March 16th!

Andrew with his fabric sequencer.