Sunday, June 14, 2009
AD-150 high-speed VTOL unmanned aerial vehicle
Thursday, June 4, 2009
BuckyBalls Magnetic Building Spheres
BuckyBalls In Action
BuckyBalls Magnetic Building Spheres
Super powerful, rare earth, magnetic balls - for you to play with.
Make sculptures, puzzles, patterns, shapes, jewelry . . . the joy is endless.
Each set contains 216 BuckyBalls.
Ages: Not for kids or adults under 12 years of age.
Dimensions: each Buckyball is approx. 0.125" in diameter.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Full Body Motion Control for the Xbox
At the E3 Expo, Microsoft unveiled something called “Project Natal” which is a whole new way to interact with your Xbox 360. Like Nintendo’s Wii, Natal lets you control a game using motion, but unlike the Wii – very unlike it, in fact – you don’t hold any sort of controllers or sensors in order to do so.
Instead, the bar that sits above or below your TV has a camera, sensors, and a microphone within its casing. In other words, it can see you and your movements. It even does facial and voice recognition and lets you swipe through screens by moving your hands (how “Minority Report” is that!)
Although Project Natal has no official name, pricing, or release date yet, development kits are being sent out to partners now.
See full artical at ... http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/Project-Natal-Revealed-Full-Body-Motion-Control-for-the-Xbox/
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Shadow Robotic Hand
Monday, May 25, 2009
SRV-1 Blackfin Mobile Surveillance Robot
Explore the dangerous terrain of your home or office with the SRV-1 Mobile Robot. This palm sized bot packs tank-like treads a 1000MIPS 500MHz Blackfin BF537 processor and a mini video camera. Using 802.11b/g wi-fi the SRV-1 interfaces wirelessly with a remote PC. The Java-based console software includes a built-in web server to monitor and control the SRV-1 via a web browser from anywhere in the world, as well as archive video feeds on demand or on a scheduled basis. Get programming with fully open-source software for robot and host computer.
Important Note
The SRV-1 Mobile Robot comes fully assembled and ready to use, but requires some technical knowledge of Java, networking and the command line to set-up the software. If you feel comfortable tinkering and have had experience configuring a basic web server you should be in fine shape. Read the SRV-1 Set-Up Instructions and you'll have a good idea if you've got what it takes.
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Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 - Test Drive
· Aims to become a tool for everyone involved in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – from architects to developers, from project managers to testers. Not just for developers.
· Unified Development and Database product editions.
Design & Architecture
· Architecture Explorer – to discover and identify existing code assets and architecture in number of ways including graphs, stacked diagrams and dependency matrices.
· Ability to create and share various types of diagrams like use case, activity and sequence diagrams.
· Modeling tools that are tightly integrated with code and thus helps in keeping model and code in sync.
· Architectural Validations - Ways to put constraints on code using models and doing validations at the time of check-ins and builds.
· Architecture Layer Diagram – One of the most useful and simple tool getting introduced. It allows representing your application architecture in form of layers and showing dependencies between them. It also allows to map physical components like classes, namespaces etc. to map to these layers. After all mappings you can validate whether the code meets the expected mappings and constraints.
· Microsoft joins OMG and UML gets introduced in Visual Studio 2010.
· Support for UML 2.1.1 – 5 out of 13 diagrams – use case, component, activity, class and sequence diagrams.
· Ability to keep all the UML diagrams in sync so that a change in one automatically reflects on others.
· UML design tool is developed using DSL toolkit.
· Will be interoperable with Visio 1.1 templates.
· Supports Top to bottom design approach.
· Supports Bottom to top design approach – reverse engineer. Filter based on namespaces, number of level deep.
· Model Explorer – Similar to Solution Explorer, this allows you to explore all the models you have created which includes objects created as part of various UML diagrams – logical view.
· Ability to create a Sequence Diagram from existing source, simply by right clicking in the VS code editor and selecting "Generate Sequence Diagram..."
· Parallel Programming: To better utilize power of multi-processor and multi-core machines, .NET 4.0 will add support for parallel programming using PLINQ, Task Parallel Library and Coordination Data Structures. The debugger has been enhanced to identify concurrency issues. Two new features added are MultiStack and a Task List views. Introduction of concurrency analysis report for performance analysis of applications.
Quality/ Testing
· Test Impact View - Identify and run only the tests impacted by a code.
· Eliminating ‘no-repro’ bug i.e. bugs that can’t be reproduced by providing tools for better collection of test data.
· The Microsoft Test Runner Tool – a standalone tool that a tester uses to guide them through a series of steps to complete a test case. During the test run, this tool can take snapshot of test environment, application screenshots and even capture full video for assisting in reproducing bugs.
Source Code Management
· Enhanced version control capabilities including gated check-in, branch visualization and build workflow.
· Ability to perform constraints check on code during check-in based on Architecture Layer Diagram.
Project Management
· Integration with Project Server for enterprise wide project management and new features for Agile project scheduling with Excel.
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-20-Downloading-and-Installing-Visual-Studio-2010-Beta-1/
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Firefly Cellphone in Ireland (from O2)
The new Firefly wireless phone is designed for kids. It is easy to use. Just press a couple of buttons to place a call. There is no need to remember numbers or dial. The special phone book makes this possible. It can hold up to 22 pre-programmed numbers. Use parental control options to limit incoming and outgoing call to the numbers in the phone book.
With just 5 (front) keys, it brings mobiles back to what they were originally designed to do - keep you connected. Firefly phones also keep it fun with lights, sounds, colours and animations.
Most importantly, it has PIN-protected features so you can control who the user receives calls from and, who they speak to.
Firefly Fireworks™ display flashes when making and receiving calls, during standby, and when charging.
The user also has:
12 ringtones
5 animations
7 LCD screen backlight colours
A huge range of accessories to choose from.
visit www.mrmubi.com for latest news.
http://www.o2online.ie/wps/wcm/connect/O2/Home/Shop/Phones/Firefly+for+kids/
Monday, May 18, 2009
Color Picker Pen
With color picker, all range of artists will be able to cerate a more sensorial and visual insight of their surrounding nature’s colors. This is amazing innovation by Jinsun Park. Color Picker is an great design of a concept pen that can scan colors from anything around and instantly use the color for drawing. After placing the pen in front of an object, the user just presses the scan button. The color is being detected by the color sensor and the RGB cartridge of the pen mixes the required inks to create the target color. This superb device will help people to observe the changing colors of nature.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Tahoe-II Development Board
Dr. Ahmed Javad, who has alway encouraged me to
welcome the new technology. Next couple of weekends will be very
interesting working on it.
The Tahoe-II development platform is the ideal place to start when developing small, smart, connected devices. Featuring the .NET Micro Framework, you have the hardware and software tools to get your project done faster than ever before. Through its fully integrated Visual Studio experience, the .NET Micro Framework brings a reliable and productive development environment to the world of embedded development. Complex applications can be developed and debugged faster by leveraging the powerful emulator and Visual Studio’s debugging capabilities. The familiar development environment also enables .NET desktop programmers to work easily on embedded projects. The Tahoe- features a 3.5” touch-screen LCD, wired and wireless networking, USB function for interfacing to PCs, an accelerometer for innovative sensing and user interface applications. When you need to prototype a new device, the Tahoe-II has easy access to an array of expansion options; including serial ports, I2C, SPI and plenty of GPIO. The Tahoe-II is built around the Meridian CPU, while features a Freescale i.MXS ARM9 processor, 4Mbytes of Flash, 8Mbytes of RAM. Moving from prototype to production is simple with the Meridian CPU. The Meridian CPU and the .NET Micro Framework are ideal for applications such as; industrial automation, home automation, healthcare, consumer devices, retail point-of-sale, PC peripherals, and automotive applications. | ||||
- Meridian CPU (ARM920 @ 100MHz, 4Mbytes Flash, 8Mbytes SDRAM)
- 3.5” Landscape TFT LCD with touch-screen
- 9 user input buttons
- RS232 serial (DB9)
- USB Function
- Ethernet
- Accelerometer, with support for event notification including free-fall detection
- SD Card interface
- Temperature sensor and 2x ADC channels
- Interface for XBee wireless module (and additional ADC channels if fitted)
- PWM output
- Expansion connectors that expose GPIO, I2C, SPI and UART signals
Meccano Spykee Wi-Fi Spy Robot
See how it looks like before you purchase.
For further details and to purchase this item you can go to http://www.robotshop.ca/meccano-spyke-wifi-robot-1.html.