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 Read more about March Music Night[…]

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, Read more about Online pixel art program PIQ[…]

The hacklab will be open tonight (Thursday 29th March) from 7:30pm for the weekly Software night. Bit later than usual to give everyone a chance to enjoy the sunshine. Why Clementines? If it’s still warm then refreshing fruit may be just the thing for a night of code hacking. Don’t worry we still have Coffee! Read more about Clementines (Coffee) & Code[…]

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 Read more about Default title[…]

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, Read more about Quadcopters + Music = OMG!!![…]

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 Read more about Music Night Feb 2012[…]

This was a particularly formidable night, owing to the arrival of Stephen with his awesome home-made hurdy gurdy. I also gave a bit of a talk about SuperCollider, and some hacklabbers got to try it out on their laptops. We got Ioann’s old Yamaha keyboard working and played with pugs. The next music night will Read more about Edinburgh Hacklab Music Night, January 2012[…]

Global game Jam was held at Napier University for Edinburgh this year. I took part with one of my friends, Tom Joyce. We had previously taken part in a game jam before. The theme for the 48h game development event was a picture of a snake eating its tail laid out in a circle.

Our interpretation for the theme was the circle of life, but we also took more literal elements in the form of snake poison. Our game celled Apoptosis (official term for the cellular mechanism of programmed cell suicide) follows the journey of a poison acting on a body, at the cellular level (level 1), the arterial level (level 2) and organs (level 3). Hacklab is kindly hosting it here (Chrome recommended).

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Ubuntu has a new feature for the unity desktop, you can “search” for commands in menus of (seemingly) legacy apps and across programs. It creates a really cool console way of interacting with GUI programs. This is better than windows’ search the start menu for programs which I also like a lot. Damn, the HUD Read more about Ubuntu HUD[…]