This is pretty wild, and I won’t pretend like I completely understand all of what’s going on here, but a company called Flylogic has been tearing down CMOS devices and posting some awesome images of their discoveries. Their latest effort is based on one of my favorite chips, the Atmel ATmega88. They have analyzed many other devices, highlighting possible security flaws, weird design features, and other anomalies. Pretty incredible what you find in a $3.00 chip!

Ng Beng Kiat is a talented guy who’s built many “micromouse” style robots. These tiny machines zip through mazes in disturbingly short amounts of time. His newest creation, Min5, is faster than the previous Min4A, which you can check out a really rad video of here. Watch the video all the way through - near the end Min4A does two optimized runs that are just insanely fast. What’s especially crazy is that somewhere, someone builds faster robots than this guy.

In a recent post, I covered Zonbu, a weird little computer that is really closer to a thin client than anything else. If that idea whets your appetite, you may be interested to know that there are plenty of other similar systems out there. Witness Koolu, Linutop, and fit PC. Not surprisingly, these machines are hardly household names, so no doubt there are other similar devices lurking deep in the bowels of the intarweb. As these little boxes become more powerful, it will be interesting to see if they gain widespread adoption.

I’m not big on picking up stories that all the other sites have covered to death, but this is just too cool. A 16 year old kid has built a bike made entirely of wood. To me, the most interesting part of the machine is the “ratcheting” mechanism that lets the rear wheel coast when you’re not pedaling. Though, I guess the chain was pretty tough to design.

Link - via Make

With the annual CES show kicking off, Wowwee is showing off their new products for 2008. The most interesting thing I noticed was the Rovio, which apparently includes NorthStar “GPS” - which I believe is actually NorthStar infrared localization, which was developed by Evolution Robotics. The development kit for this localization technology costs a cool $1700, while Wowwee’s robot will supposedly cost only $300. At that price, I would pick one up just to reverse engineer the NorthStar system.

So far as I know, the Rovio will be the first consumer robot to integrate NorthStar technology. Now if only Wowwee would build a cheap robot that uses VSLAM…

A really cool open source project that has been brewing for a while is OpenServo. The basic idea was to create a high performance replacement for the guts of standard hobby servos. The clunky RC communication protocol has been ditched for a much more convenient I2C interface, which allows a truckload of OpenServos to be controlled by one master device. That’s great, but the real achievement is cascaded PID control of position, speed, and current. On top of that, the developers have given OpenServo the ability to interpret motion profiles based on a few parameters. The hangup is that the hardware and software design so far is intended to be used with hobby servos only, which get position feedback from a cheesy potentiometer instead of a quadrature encoder. If quadrature encoder support was added (and I believe it is in the works), the hardware design should scale up really well for larger motors. The software is already to a point that would make it useful for a wide variety of applications other than small hobby servos. This should be a great project to follow.