Vision guided brick sorter, sort all my LEGOs!. One day a just saw this LEGO Mindstorms NXT Vision Guided Brick Sorter ver1 video. It shows how LEGO bricks are sorted by shape and weight using robotics built with LEGO bricks and LEGO Mindstorms NXT controller. →
Finnish mobile game company Supercell has been on news lately with following kind of headlines: Supercell raises another round of funding at $130M on a valuation of $770M, sees revenues of $2.4M a day. The latest flow of news started when Forbes praises this Finnish game company in Is This The Fastest-Growing Game Company Ever? →
Today Android sits as the most dominant mobile operating system on the planet, but would you believe that the platform’s original concept was aimed at? Do you know what was it? It was not associated with mobile phones. Android’s original plan was revealed in a speech at the Japan New Economy Summit in Tokyo on →
The markings on SMD components have been always hard to read. Besides the fact that the numbers and letters in them are very small, the number coding used on them is different than what is used on traditional though-hole components (the reason is that there would not be enough space to print any long codes →
Tietoviikko reports that Finland (my home country) is the world’s best IT country according to World Economic Forum study The Global Information Technology Report 2013. According to the study, Finland is the world’s number one country when it comes to the economy’s ability to use information technology to competitiveness and prosperity. Finland has toppled Sweden →
Twisted pair Ethernet (10 and 100 Mbit/s) uses two pairs of wires. Ethernet (10 Mbit/s works well, 100 Mbit/s sometimes) can be run on the old telephone wiring. There some years ago quite a bit of interest in reusing old telephone wiring for Ethernet connections. Reusing old installed wiring for Ethernet works usually well if →
10 Ways to Destroy an Arduino article tells how you can accidentally destroy Arduino board. Use a sledgehammer, fire a bullet at it, throw it into a pool….that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re going to show you how to electrically destroy your Arduino: Method #1: Shorting I/O Pins to Ground Method #2: Shorting I/O →
Twisted pair Ethernet (10 and 100 Mbit/s) uses two pairs of wires. 10BASE-T Ethernet was designed to be be used on CAT3 quality wiring. 100BASE-TX was designed to be used with CAT5 wiring or better. Since the early 2000s most new structured cable installations are built with Category 5e or Category 6 cable. There are →
Bartenders beware: A robotic drink-dispensing rig is aiming to steal your customers while pouring cocktail creations at the push of a touchscreen button. This Open Source Robot Bartender Pours the Perfect Mix article tells about bartender robot that the creators call Bartendro: Operated through an iPad interface, this device holds up to 15 bottles of →
A standard hobby RC servo motor is designed to rotate through only 180 degrees. They are most often used in RC applications (like steering). The servo motor controlling is done with servo control pulses (1-2 ms pulse at around 50 Hz rate). More details on the control signals can be found at Servo protocol web →