Arduino project for catching my cats on the kitchen counter, while they’re up there doing food intelligence work 🙂

Arduino nano in iPod Touch box. Switch arms toy gun, Knob controls trigger distance. Opto-isolators fire toy gun.

Maxbotic ultrasonic rangefinder senses distance and determines if sonar field has been interrupted ( by cat). The gun just makes a silly little ‘p-tang’ sound and flashes a red LED in it’s barrel. The cats seem to completely ignore this 🙂

Consider the Source

The Open Source Robotics Foundation, Inc. is an independent non-profit organization founded by members of the global robotics community. The mission of the OSR Foundation is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.
One major project is ROS (Robot Operating System) which provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. ROS is licensed under an open source, BSD license.
This video shows a robotic arm driven by the ROS software and operating as a picker/placer.

Consider the Source

Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame. The quadrotors play this “couch guitar” by flying over guitar strings stretched across a couch frame; plucking the strings with a stiff wire attached to the base of the quadrotor. A special microphone attached to the frame records the notes made by the “couch guitar”.
These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is home to some of the most innovative robotics research on the planet, much of it coming out of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab.
This video premiered at the TED2012 Conference in Long Beach, California on February 29, 2012. Deputy Dean for Education and GRASP lab member Vijay Kumar presented some of this groundbreaking work at the TED2012 conference, an international gathering of people and ideas from technology, entertainment, and design.
The engineers from Penn, Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev, have formed a company called KMel Robotics that will design and market these quadrotors.
More information: http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/penn-quadrotors-ted
Video Produced and Directed by Kurtis Sensenig
Quadrotors and Instruments by Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev and Vijay Kumar

To false religion, humor remains one of the most dreaded adversaries. Humor punctures the pomposities of theological arrogance with an efficacy wondrous to behold. — Vern Bennom Grimsley (1964)

[E]very mechanism that is characterized by extreme complexity and automatism, combined with a far-reaching range and unity, must inevitably conceal the originative mind from every intelligence that is far below its own capacity, and must therefore appear to such an intelligence as wholly “mindless”, although its real nature may be quite the reverse.  —J. E. Turner (1926)

Sumerian legends locate the land of Paradise, where the gods first blessed mankind with manners of civilized life, in Dilmun on the shore of the Persian Gulf.  —Harold Peake & Herbert John Fleure (1927)

[I]n life there are so many factors involved that mathematical enumeration is the smallest and often the least important element involved. No illustration is more apt than the time-worn example of the logics, wherein it is presumed that if one man could dig a well in ten days, ten men could dig it in one. The mathematics is, of course, perfect, but worthless as overlooking the fact that ten men would, in that kind of a task, be in each other’s way.  —Ralph Tyler Flewelling (1926)

When we recall what keen interest children take in all work with tools, how they follow eagerly each process, and what pleasure they derive from using chips, blocks, and shavings as playthings, we may be sure that however humble the carpenter’s shop of Joseph, it afforded inexhaustible delight to the child Jesus and his playmates. —George A. Barton (1922)

Renunciation really taught a great life-policy, though no one was aware of it. It is the method, in its refined form, of increasing life’s fraction by lowering the denominator of demands instead of striving always to increase the numerator of satisfactions. It comes to be one of the great life-philosophies. —Sumner & Keller (1927)

Where the eye is upon superfluities, either of quantity or quality, rather than bare necessities, there self-maintenance passes over toward self-gratification, and vanity-wants and pleasure-wants supersede hunger-wants.  —W. G. Sumner and A. G. Keller (1927)