Blair Hanley Frank

[Photo: Romotive on Kickstarter]Robots are loads of fun to play with, but despite the prevalence of easy-to-use microcontrollers like the Arduino, and kits to make your own bots, the barrier to entry when it comes to owning your own robot is often pretty high. Enter Romo, a robot that uses your smartphone to power everything it does.

At its core, Romo's pretty simple: You put your smartphone into a clear chassis and load it up with apps to get it rolling along on a pair of tank treads. Instead of relying on a dock connector to communicate between the phone and the chassis, Romo relies on the transmission of different audio frequencies through your phone’s headphone jack. This means that Romo will be usable by both Android and iOS users, without requiring that you fiddle with adapters, or purchase a chassis that would only be usable by a specific phone.

Remember those old text adventures, like Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? You may think that the text adventure is deader than disco, what with the advances in graphical technology that allow the creation of more and more realistic games, but you would be wrong. Thanks to a host of quality tools for the creation of interactive fiction, sites like the Interactive Fiction Archive are still receiving submissions of new games. But maybe you're like me, and you're looking for a greater challenge than trying to figure out how not to get eaten by a Grue.

In that case, you might try your hand at writing some interactive fiction yourself. It's a surprisingly simple process to pick up–you can try your hand at it without staring down a bunch of difficult syntax. Your first step is going to be picking up a program called Inform. It's a cross-platform development environment for all things interactive fiction. The neat thing about Inform is that you can create a game without having to know programming syntax–all you need is a functional knowledge of the English language.

If you're headed for a midnight showing of Captain America and want to cook up something quick that will demonstrate your love for Cap, Instructables user Seamster has you covered. He has created a set of instructions for building your own lightweight shield out of cardboard and duct tape. 

It’s designed to be sturdy, light, and most of all, throwable.  (Nobody seems to have figured out how to make it return like a boomerang, though.)  So, if you have a spare box or two laying around the house and a few hours before you head to the theater, this could be just the project for you.  For a demonstration of how it flies, check out the video below.

The Kinect is the hacking gift that keeps on giving. Whether it’s recreating the Minority Report interface, generating holograms, or just making life a bit more comic, the Kinect has been hacked six ways from Sunday. And yet, the great hacks just keep rolling in. Ryan Challinor, a programmer at Harmonix Music Systems, has created Synapse, a toolkit that makes it easy for someone to control Ableton Live, Quartz Composer, and MaxMSP using a Kinect.

Inspired by YouTube videos of others using the Kinect to make music (especially Dubstep), Challinor decided to use the experience he had programming Dance Central for the XBox and create a way for people to easily connect the Kinect to tools already used by musicians. He created it as a performance tool for Burning Man, and has now released it as a free software package for other people to use.

If you’re like me, you love the taste of espresso, but hate the force required to form a proper puck of grounds to get the best extraction. Tamp unevenly, and you’ll end up with an uneven extraction which will detract from the deliciousness of the espresso. That’s where Roy Eid’s espresso-tamping machine comes in. The whole thing is built around a Parallax Propeller board, and uses a bunch of servos to properly measure and compact the espresso.

Using a custom made keypad, you can choose from three different flavors of coffee (each in its own separate hopper), and whether you want enough for two or four shots. The machine then feeds the grounds into the filter basket, and tamps the grounds using a repurposed inkjet printer cartridge carrier, leaving you with a ready-to-brew puck.

[Photo: Marshal Banana on Flickr]Some Lego builds are impressive, others are awe-inspiring. Flickr user Marshal Banana has spent the last nine months creating a minifigure-scale Lego Sandcrawler. It’s built from scratch, with over 10,000 bricks making up both a beautiful exterior, as well as a fully lit interior.

Not content to simply have a really awesome looking replica, the Sandcrawler features a remote-controlled drive system, along with a motorized ramp, working crane, and conveyor belt, which you can see in the video below.

Screen from a YouTube video demonstrating the brainwave lightbulb.Sometimes, you have a bright idea, and you just want the world to know about it. Jeri Ellsworth decided to hack together a lightbulb that would hover over her head and tell the world when she’s thinking. The lightbulb contains a pair of LEDs (one red, one green) and attaches to a band with a pair of electrodes inside it that goes around the user’s head. In addition, a third electrode is connected to the user’s arm.

The input from the two skull electrodes is compared against the baseline provided by the third electrode by an instrumentation amplifier hung around the user’s neck along with a battery pack. The resulting signal is transmitted to the LEDs, to inform the masses of your cognitive activity.

A morning’s cup of coffee isn’t what one would generally consider a meal, but for a bacterium known as Pseudomonas putida CBB5, it is. The bacterium uses specialized enzymes to convert the complex caffeine molecule into simpler ammonia and carbon dioxide. In the process, it “feeds” off the caffeine, using it as a means of gaining energy. No word yet as to whether or not it gets jitters, though.

On its own, this is nothing special, but scientists at the University of Iowa have managed to locate the genes responsible for the production of caffeine-consuming N-demethylase enzymes that the bacterium uses.

[Photo: Pioneer]When it comes to connecting your smartphone to your car, the extent to which the two are integrated is, in general, fairly limited. Sure, you can make phone calls, and maybe listen to music, but that’s about it. In this day and age, when apps are so important to your use of a smartphone, that seems woefully insufficient to me. Pioneer Electronics is trying to fill that gap with a new gadget it calls the AppRadio.

The AppRadio will connect to your iPhone or iPod Touch, and features a 6.1” capacitive touchscreen. It is designed to act as a regular radio, with an AM/FM tuner, as well as feature all of the usual smartphone bells and whistles, like hands-free calling and iPod playback.

Normally, when you empty your computer’s trash or recycle bin, files are (mostly) removed from your computer. A new open-source project called Dumpster Drive is hoping to turn that on its head. To get Dumpster Drive to work, you install client software (which is at this point Mac-only, though they’re hoping for others to port it to Windows and Linux) which adds a Dumpster folder to your desktop. You drag any unneeded files to that folder, and then use the client software to empty the dumpster folder.

The files are deleted from your hard drive as normal, but are then uploaded to a Dumpster Drive server, which anyone else with the client software can access and download files from. There’s a catch: the files left on the central server can only be downloaded once, though it’s possible to replace them once you’re finished.

When it comes to playing golf, there are very few variables the golfer has control over. The best way to perform well on the course is to swing well, which is easier said than done. A golfer has to be in touch with the tempo of their swing, the placement of their feet, the position of their hands and arms, and their grip. One of the easiest mistakes to make as a golfer is to hold on to the club handle like your life depends on it.

Of course, monitoring your grip strength while you’re trying to bring the head of your club into contact with a small white ball in front of you is hard to do. The SensoGlove is designed to help correct grip problems in your swing, wherever they happen to be.

[Photo: Sascha Pohflepp]A camera, at its most basic, is made up of two things: a sensitive medium to capture light, and some hole to selectively allow the light to hit whatever is going to be capturing it. Artist Sascha Pohflepp is trying to turn that on its head. Her project Buttons has no optics of any sort, and from the outside, simply looks like an acrylic box with a button on it. It does collect images, though.

Buttons is powered by a Sony Ericsson K750i phone running custom software that records the exact time when the Buttons’ single button is pressed, and transmits that data to a server. That server begins searching Flickr for the photos taken at the time the button was pressed, while Buttons continues to query the server for an image.