Category — robots

wink wink

[norris labs | via make]

WHAT: An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.

WHY: No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon, just like waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of Mom cooking breakfast. Unless you’re Jewish.

HOW: A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n’ Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.

[wake n bacon]

[videos and descriptions here]

[Read em here]

Watch as these autonomous copters take some beach ball abuse and keep flying.

“The Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC) is a multi vehicle test bed used to demonstrate new concepts in multi-agent control on a real-world platform. STARMAC consists of six quadrotor vehicles that autonomously track a given waypoint trajectory, and perform higher level optimal control strategies online. In order to make such a testbed easy to use, we focused on a small and light, lowcost design, which presented numerous opportunities for innovative work.”

“The resulting vehicles can fly safely in both indoor and outdoor environments, can carry computing and sensing resources sufficient for autonomous operation and perception, and have simple, reconfigurable construction with low maintenance requirements.”

[via diydrones | Starmac Stanford]

[New Scientist]

[by notanartist on Flickr]