Archive for February, 2008

Hovercraft Page up

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Heya, I just put up my hold DIY hovercraft page that used to be there. Keep in mind that project is now about 6 years old, check it out if you get a chance. leaf blower hovercrafts are the perfect thing for science fair projects or just if you’re bored ;)

Project updates

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Alright, first off, I have some more photos of interfacing the wiimote with a computer.

Here’s the wiimote detecting the IR dots from the sensor bar. You can see the bar on the left of my monitor, and the wiimote readout is on the screen.

Wiimote and monitor

Here’s me playing with the LEDs on the wiimote and showing that you can send commands from the computer directly to the wiimote:

Wiimote 3

And now, here’s some pictures of my robotic arm that I’ve been working on :D. I have some videos too and I will try to get those uploaded soon.
Robot Assembly 1
Robot Assembly 2
Finished Arm

Robotic Arm Complete

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Well I recieved and built the robotic arm and have a few images and videos. I’ll try to upload them sometime during this week.

Current Pages

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

So right now the only pages that I have are the one for the disposable camera flash coil gun (coilgun) and the page for the pneumatic potato cannon / launcher. In a little bit I’m going to put the page for my old homemade hovercraft up and the page of my carpet rover robot. I’m also going to post some other robots that i’ve created in a little while.

also news update: I’ve ordered the parts for the robotic arm so hopefully I’ll have it set up and running by the end of the weekend.

Wiimote control

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

So I had read a few articles about people who had been able to connect a wiimote to their computer and interface with it so I thought it might be fun to try it out. It was amazingly simple to set up on OSX and all I needed was a piece of opensource software called DarwiinRemote. Here’s a few pics of the software working:

Wiimote 1

(here you can see the three axis of acceleration. the first part of the graph is me waving the remote in circles, and the erratic part is just waving it around really fast)

Wiimote 2

(this is the view of how the wiimote sees the sensor bar)

The software is pretty interesting and maybe eventually I could make a few fun programs that could make good use of all the info this software returns from the wiimote. One of the features it comes with is being able to control the mouse with the wiimote which is pretty useful (I now keep my wiimote by my bed so I can use my computer in comfort ;)

New Project

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

I’m planning on soon investing in a robotic arm kit to play around with automation and hopefully eventually use it to perform repetitive tasks (more information later) Here’s what it looks like: 

Robotic Arm

pretty cool eh? 

Redoing Wonko Labs

Monday, February 4th, 2008

Well it’s been probably more than a year now but I just upgraded the software for this site and decided to completely redo it. I’m just going to use it to store info about projects that I have worked on or will work on in the future and to just be a general blog. I won’t be putting the forum back online but I still urge you to register and comment on posts and such. But if anyone really wants it back or just some of the information I do have backups of it and you can request those if you’d like. Thats all for now, see ya later.