Pong, an engine, and Bond theme (oh my!)

April 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Hopefully you’re not on a network that blocks YouTube, because we’re sharing videos that show off three different projects. Alas, they don’t give any details about the development process, but we think you’ll like seeing the end results just the same.

First up is a Stirling engine. This one is pretty serious business, with machined parts making up the alcohol-lamp powered engine [Thanks Pete]. This is much more elegant than the tuna can version from last month.

Bust out your Arduino and give theoriginal video game a go. This game of Pong is played on an oscilloscope using two micro-trimpots. To make it happen a pair of MCP4901 DAC chips are feeding the probes.

While you’ve got that friendly blue breakout board out, might as well grab a set of old foppy drives. Here is an eight-channel version of the James Bond theme [via Technabob]. Unlike the sampler from the other week, this one uses the stepper motor noise to create sweet music.

Filed Under: misc hacks Tagged With: , ,

Quadrotor squadron plays the [James Bond] theme song in preparation for world domination

March 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

quadrotor-james-bond-theme

If you weren’t already a big fan of quadrotors by this point, we’re pretty sure the video below will get you on the bandwagon in no time flat.

The video was debuted this past week at the TED2012 conference, giving [Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev, and Vijay Kumar] from the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, a chance to show off their amazing robotics work. The team used a set of autonomous quadrotors to play the [James Bond] theme, complete with keyboard, drums, cymbals, guitar, and maracas.

The coordination of the robots undoubtedly took an incredible amount of time to orchestrate, but after watching the video we think it is well worth the effort. Now of course you can’t simply input a piece of sheet music into the quadrotor control system and expect them to play it, but we imagine that time will arrive before you know it!

Continue reading to see the [James Bond] theme song in full, and be sure to swing by the U Penn site to read more about the project.

Thanks to everyone who sent this one in!

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Filed Under: musical hacks, robots hacks Tagged With: , , , ,