WALL•E Writer/Director Andrew Stanton is being interviewed right now on NPR. Very interesting stuff. If you can’t tune in right now, you’ll be able to listen to it in digital streaming form later this afternoon:

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13

[Edit] Unfortunately, it sounds like Terry hasn’t actually seen the movie. Oh well, Andrew Stanton is an interesting dude nonetheless.

He started a thread about this in our forums, so head on over there to give him props, ask questions, etc:
Laser Harp Mk III

If you haven’t read the original thread from when he first completed the project, check it out here:
Frameless Laser Harp

If you want more info on how it was made, or if you want to build your own, follow this link to Stephens’s site:
The Laboratory

Enough said.

Gepetto, one of the runners up in our last contest, got some airtime on G4 TV’s "Attack of the Show" this past Tuesday!  This bot has been generating quite a bit of buzz, which isn’t surprising.  It has style, good mechanical design, brains, and high-caliber weaponry.  Also, people just can’t resist videos of a robot attacking its creator (TR community member darkback2).  In the video, Gepetto is featured along with Plen and the CMU snake robot.

Congratulations!

Linkage:
AotS Blog post
Video

We don’t want to take too much credit here, but let’s not forget where we first saw Gepetto.  Right here, in the Trossen Robotics Community.  Booyah.

Jeffrey describes his Pico Bayard: “This computer was inspired by a design by the French clockmaker Bayard. It is an example of the art deco skyscraper school of design that flourished between the world wars. The clock’s landscape orientation was rare for the period.”

The Pico Bayard and the G-metric Nano by Jeffrey Stephenson

More pictures after the fold…

The exposed heat sink of the Pico on the bottom of the Pico Bayard

The G-metric Nano

We were invited out to Makers Faire by our friends over at Microsoft Coding4Fun. They wanted us to build some fun stuff using Visual Studio Express that would entertain the kids and families attending the event. The Visual Studio Express is a free version of Visual Studio that is aimed at the hobby market place. We use it in a lot of our projects and find it has most everything you need even if you are a serious developer.

We built two projects for the Faire. One was a shooting gallery which we have no good footage of and the other project was our magic air tubes. Below is the only descent footage we got of the air tubes because we were so swamped the whole time we could only grab a camera when there wasn’t a sea of ankle biters swarming the booth

See if you can figure out how we built it before scrolling down to the answer below.

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How we built the project.

Input: 8 IR sensors plugged into a Phidgets 8/8/8 Interface Kit (A/D converter)

Then we wrote a program which converted the variable signal input caused by people waving their hands into a variable fan speed output.

Output: 2 Phidget 4-servo motor controllers plugged into 8 Banebot DC motor controllers plugged into 8 high speed fans.

And that my friends is how you entertain Makers Faire Attendees.