Cornell Students Build Sustainable House in Nicaragua

Over winter break, Cornell students began building an affordable and environmentally sustainable model house in Nicaragua. The students, who are part of Cornell University Sustainable Design — an organization that promotes sustainability through design — traveled to Nagarote, Nicaragua to build the house. The house will serve not only as a home for a family, … Read more

Home Based Manufacturing & Recycling

The Filabot brings a miniature recycling plant to your desktop, grinding down everyday plastic waste and transforming it into ready-to-use material for your 3d printing. Water pipes, drink bottles, plastic wrappers and Lego bricks can be fed into the machine which grinds, melts and extrudes the plastic into a filament of either 3mm or 1.75mm … Read more

Train Your Ear to the Pulse of Innovation — 3d Printing is Here!

Need a new knocker for the front door? Select a design and push the print button. How about that fork that got damaged in the garbage disposal? Scan one of the remaining ones and print a replacement. Printing 3d objects at home is now possible although the choices of material are somewhat limited. Soon, very … Read more

Heads Up! Smart Glass is Here!

Forget your smartphone, shelve the tablet, and clear your desktop for something useful. Those great looking sunglasses may be your key to Cognitive Demand. It’s not enough for Google, Microsoft, and others to be in your face. They want to be on your face! Microsoft plans to deliver “augmented reality” – where data and illustrations … Read more

‘Homemade’ 3d Printer

Coffman High School teacher, Jim Roscoe, with the help of students, built a 3D printer last spring and is now turning out plastic items that can be used in a number of scenarios. The machine melts plastic from a spool to make 3D items. “All the information for this is open source,” Roscoe said. “The … Read more

Arduino “Counter Intelligence” II

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 … Read more

Getting Into Robotics

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 … Read more

James Bond Theme by Robot Quadrotors

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 … Read more