[via Facebook]
Jason Lentz has an amazing cardboard robot costume, and frequents events like Burning man and the recent Maker Fair in SF. He has quite a collection of robot suit iterations in his Flickr page, and if you’re feeling envious, you can buy one of his robot arms on Etsy for a mere $85 USD or attempt to make your own with his provided schematics. You can also check out Jason’s fan page on Facebook.
While doing my morning reading, I came across this gem of a device. It’s a DB9 pin-compatible USB port. That means for every board you have that originally took a DB9-style serial port, you can now drop in this device and have USB access instead. Inside the connector is FTDI’s ubiquitous USB-to-serial converter chip. Too bad it’s taken so long for something like this to show up. I can recall about 5 years ago when just about every robotic kit needed a serial port instead of USB. Thankfully things have begun to change, but this could be a great add-on to any legacy boards you find around the house or lab.
You can read the datasheet here.
[Via Electronics-Lab]
Check out some of the new robots added to RobotBox. For those that don’t know, RobotBox is a new community website for robot builders to show off their projects and inspire other builders. You can add your robot here.
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From the same folks that brought us the Wild World of Robots, comes the Cyborgs On The Screen infographic. Full graphic after the jump.
Mass High Tech has posted an interview with iRobot’s CEO, Colin Angle, on their plans for the future. Angle discusses their plans to combat the “demographic shift” of a 4:1 caregiver to care-needer ratio to a 1:1 ratio in the next 20 years. In other words, in the next 20 years, there will be a huge need for people or robots to take care of the elderly. iRobot is now focusing on how to help people perform physical tasks that may become difficult as we age. They are starting with plans for a “robot buddy” – probably much like the iRobot ConnectR prototype from a few years back. The new initial products will have a consumer focus, but will leverage government funding to make them cost effective.
As for other home innovations, Angle says, “We’re not done there by any stretch of the imagination.”
What do you think will be the next cool robot to come out of iRobot?
[Via @iRobotSPARK via @Transbotica]
