Author: sweethess

It makes sense considering evolution, but nature comes up with lots of different ways to do things. consider moving. Land animals walk on four feet or two, some jump, and some use peristalsis or otherwise slither. Oddly, though, mother nature never developed the wheel (although the mother-of-pearl moth’s caterpillar will form its entire body into a hoop and roll away from attackers). Human-developed robots which, on the other hand, most often use wheels. even a tank track has wheels within. [Joesinstructables] latest robot still uses wheels, but it emulates the slithering motion of a snake, He calls it the Lake Erie Mamba.

The most interesting thing about the robot is that it can reconfigure and move in several different modalities. like the caterpillar, it can even form a wheel like an ouroboros and roll. You can see that at the end of the video, below.

The base configuration slithers and uses 12 segments, each containing a servo motor. [Joe] uses a key fob remote to drive the snake, although it can move by itself, too. The brains are — what else — an Arduino. In some configurations, the snake carries its own brain and power. In others, there’s a scary-looking wiring harness necessary when the snake becomes a wheel because it has no room in that configuration for the extra items.

Real snakes have different ways they move, and so does the Lake Erie Mamba. In the slithering configuration, passive wheels convert a sine or cosine wave motion into linear motion. [Joe] explains the math behind the motion. If you take off the passive wheels, the snake can move like an inch worm. turning is complicated in this mode since it can only go forward or backward without some changes. The segments can reconfigure to put a drive wheel in play to introduce the desired lateral motion.

Real snakes can combine the two kinds of motion to “sidewind” and the Mamba can do that too. This does require reconfiguration of the segments and driving some segments with a sine wave and others with a cosine wave.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the ouroboros trick. If you think robotic snakes couldn’t possibly be useful, think again. Of course the modular robot that captured our hears is Dtto, which claimed the Grand prize in last year’s Hackaday Prize.

We like the look which [Emmanuel] achieved with his Raspberry Pi based Squeezebox client. It’s got that minimalist slant that makes it seem like a commercial product at first glance. but one a lot more look at the speakers without grates, the character LCD, and the utilitarian buttons, knobs, and switches ideas us off that it’s filled with the hardware we know and love.

Since Logitech announced that it was terminating the Squeezebox line we’ve seen several projects which take up the torch. We’ve seen the RPi used as a Squeezebox server and several embedded Linux systems used as clients. This follows in the footsteps of the latter. The RPi is running Raspbian with the squeezelite package managing the bits needed to speak to his server. The controls on the front include a power switch, rotary encoder and button for navigating the menus, and a potentiometer to adjust the HD44780 LCD screen’s contrast. The speakers are a set of amplified PC speakers that were liberated from their cases and mounted inside of the wooden box that makes up the enclosure. The in-progress shots of that case look pretty rough, but some sanding and painting really pulled everything together. As you would expect, we’ve embedded the demo video after the jump.

The Web is everywhere. the latest anecdotal evidence of this is a story of prison inmates that develop their own computer as well as linked it to the internet. Back in 2015, prisoners at the Marion Correctional organization in Ohio developed two computers from discarded parts which they transported 1,100 feet with prison grounds (even passing a security checkpoint) before hiding them in the ceiling of a training room. The info has just been made public after the release of the Inspector General’s report (PDF). This report is interesting as well as worth your time to read.

This Ethernet router was found in a training space in the prison. Physical gain access to is whatever in computer security.
Prisoners handled to gain access to the Ohio department of Rehabilitation as well as Corrections network utilizing login credentials of a retired prison worker who is currently working as a contract employee. The inmates plotted to take the identity of one more inmate as well as data tax returns under their name. They likewise gained gain access to to interior records of other prisoners as well as checked out websites on exactly how to manufacture medications as well as diy weapons, before prison officers were able to discover the hidden computers. From the report:

The ODAS OIT analysis likewise exposed that malicious activity had been happening within the ODRC inmate network. ODAS OIT reported, “…inmates appeared to have been conducting attacks against the ODRC network utilizing proxy machines that were linked to the inmate as well as department networks.” Additionally, ODAS OIT reported, “It appears the Departmental Offender tracking System (DOTS) portal was attacked as well as inmate passes were created. Findings of bitcoin wallets, stripe accounts, bank accounts, as well as credit history card accounts point toward possible identity fraud, together with other possible cyber-crimes.”

The prisoners included understood what they were doing. From the interview with the inmate it seems the computers were set up as a remote desktop bridge between interior computers they were enabled to utilize as well as the wider internet. They would utilize a computer on the inmate network as well as utilize a remote desktop to gain access to the illicit computers. These were running Kali Linux as well as there’s a listing of “malicious tools” discovered on the machines. It’s pretty much what you’d expect to discover on a Kali set up however the most entertaining one listed in the report is “Hand-Crafted Software”.

This seems crazy, however prisoners have always been coming up with new concepts to get one over on the guards — like building diy tattoo guns, When you have a great deal of time on your hands as well as bit responsibility, crazy concepts don’t seem so crazy after all.

[Paul] took this LED display along with him to maker Faire. To give it some interactivity he figured out a way to make it play live video. It is also activated using some stomp actuators built from piezo speaker elements and rubber floor mats.

This moves his original project in new directions. Back in February he was showing off the RGB LED strip display. He had it playing video but that was all dependent on using previously processed files. This upgrade uses a BeagleBone Black (the newest rendition of the ARM-based development board). [Paul] had tried using a Raspberry Pi board but had trouble with the webcam (mounted above the LED display) dropping frames. With the new board he is able to use the Video4Linux API to capture 30 frames per second and push them out to the display.

So far he’s had five out of the 1920 LEDs die on him. This shows off a couple of good things about using strips like this. A dead pixel doesn’t affect its neighbors. and replacement is as easy as cutting the ribbon on either side of the bad component, then soldering a new segment in place.

While Boston Dynamics’ big dog is pretty impressive, check out this video of the us Army’s first attempt at a quadruped vehicle. created in the early 1960s with the help of GE, this army experiment was the first successful attempt of replicating a four-legged animal with a mechanical machine.

This “Walking Truck” was driven by a single operator who moved each of the vehicle’s legs using force-feedback hydraulic levers. Choreographing the machine’s movement was quite complicated, and during testing the army found that the operator needed a mental break after only 15 minutes of use. As you can see in the video, the vehicle flexes some serious muscle. It kicks a Jeep out of its way with little effort, but it is still able to gently step on a light bulb without breaking it, due to the level of tactile feedback received by the operator.

If it weren’t for government budget cuts, we could be living out [George Lucas’] dream of AT-AT based combat right this minute!

[via Gizmodo]

Your desktop has two, four, or even eight cores, however when’s the last time you’ve seen a multicore homebrew computer? [Jack] did just that, building the DUO Mega, a 16 core computer out of a handful of ATMega microcontrollers.

From [Jack]’s description, there are 15 ‘worker’ cores, each with their own 16MHz crystal as well as connection to an 8-bit data bus. When the device is turned on, the  single ‘manager’ core – likewise an ATMega328 – polls all the workers as well as tons a program written in a customized bytecode onto each core. The cores themselves have gain access to to a shared pool of RAM (32k), a bit of Flash, a VGA out port, as well as an Ethernet controller connected to the the master core.

Since [Jack]’s DUO Mega computer has several cores, it excels at multitasking. In the video below, you can see the computer moving between a calculator app, a strange Tetris-like game, as well as a notepad app. The 16 cores in the DUO Mega likewise makes challenging calculations a great deal faster; he can produce Mandelbrot patterns quicker than any type of 8-bit microcontroller can alone, as well as likewise produces prime numbers at a great click.

[Alex Williams] produced his Open source Underwater Glider project as an entry to The Hackaday Prize, as well as now it’s one of our twenty finalists. This wonderful drone utilizes motor-actuated syringes to serve as a ballast tank, which assists the glider step ahead without the utilize of standard propellers.

Unlike a lot of UAVs, which utilize motors to actively step the craft around, [Alex]’s glider utilizes the syringes to modification the buoyancy of the craft, as well as it just glides around on its wings. When the craft starts getting as well deep, the syringes push out the water as well as the glider rises toward the surface up until it’s prepared for one more glide.

This low-power option enables for long-lasting science jobs as well as research. In addition to saving power, the glider’s sluggish travel does not disturb the water or sea life.

[Alex]’s goal is to make his glider open source as well as 3D printable, integrated with off-the-shelf hardware and ArduSub under the hood.

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