This is for those geeks who feel this game is impossible. Now there is a guitar hero robot designed just for playing Guitar Hero! It uses color sensing on the screen to detect when to press the buttons, and it uses solenoids like fingers to press the buttons on the actual Guitar Hero guitar. It’s fascinating to watch the robot while it gets a near perfect score every time! I’m sure if they work at it a little more they could perfect it to get a perfect score every time! Or you could try making a better one using the Parallax Propeller chip. There are photodiodes on the Parallax website for color sensing in the components section. A few of those and the solenoids just might do it, but you might even be able to use servos for testing purposes (assuming you can get them to push the buttons down all the way). Have fun, and soon you’ll be able to beat all your friends!
Here is an audio subwoofer that uses a new way of generating sound. This subwoofer uses a rotary design to spin at high speeds and generate very low sound frequencies at downwards of 5 hertz or lower. Frequencies of 5 Hz is almost unheard of from standard cone shaped woofers. A standard speaker design does not allow the freedom of fitting in small spaces either. This rotary speaker design uses the same effect that occurs on a propeller driven aircraft. The propeller blade’s tip generates sound as it spins in air and the sound frequency is controlled by the pitch and speed of the propeller blade. Although this particular design is patented, I would encourage you to experiment with various home grown design that would be fun to play with. Hooking propeller blades to high speed servos to rotate the blade pitch should give you the desired frequency you want as long as you program it correctly. The Parallax Propeller chip can be programmed to handle the audio controllers added. Your rotary speaker design will be able to produce sound frequency waves that could create the ultimate home theater system. Not only that, if you designed your own home system, you could make the ultimate home audio control system that would perfectly balance your audio in your home. Your home audio theater system can be completely designed and controlled with the Parallax Propeller chip. Maybe you could even make an audio set up that would automatically balance according to where you were sitting in your room. Now that would be the ultimate home theater system! Perfectly balanced sound at every frequency in the spectrum.
Here is a snake for those of you that don’t like reptiles! It’s not slimy (though snakes never are), and it can’t bite, but it does move like one! Perhaps it even moves better than a snake because it knows how to roll instead of just sliding. This prototype it being studied by the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. This robotic snake has the ability to climb up poles and inside of pipes and perform reconnaissance missions that no human could ever do. This snake robot is even capable of crawling, climbing, and swimming! That’s right, this robot will even climb up cracks or pipes or even swim through water like a real snake! This robot is designed using servos purchasable at hobby stores with some slight modifications. The chassis is built using a simple aluminum frame even you could make. Using common easy to purchase parts make these robots lower cost and easier to repair. Lower cost means it’s easier for people to buy them, and may possibly allow them to be commercially available. But the other cool part is that it may even be cheap enough to build your own simple prototype using the Parallax Propeller chip. The Parallax Propeller chip is perfectly suitable for this application because it even supports video which is necessary on this type of reconnaissance mission. Go for it, I think it a good idea.
