The Arduino LilyPad and Wearable Electronics

The LilyPad Arduino is a microcontroller board designed for wearables and e-textiles. Plum-purple and round, it has "petal"-like connectors that radiate outwards.  The LilyPad can be sewn to fabric and similarly mounted power supplies, sensors and actuators with conductive thread. The board is based on the ATmega168V (the low-power version of the ATmega168).

The LilyPad Arduino was designed and developed in a partnership between Leah Buechley and SparkFun Electronics. The e-textile construction kit was designed to empower novices to work with electronic textiles...

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A Virtual Breadboard

 


Graphically emulates hardware components, connections between them and (THE BEST PART) the code that you develop to run on the PICs or microcontrollers (yep it can even emulate a BS2!). Simply put Its a rapid electronic development and visualization tool.

The IDE has a toolbox of switches, logical gates, chips, servos, LEDs, LCDs and even a nice selection of PICs that you can click and drag onto a virtual work space (breadboard), then connect the leads by dragging wires between them, select what file\code the PIC\Microcontrollers are to load, then click the run button.

If you have LEDs or LCDs you see the output displayed on them, and if you have servos or stepper motors on the form you see them move...

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Robotic Airships

Engineers have long looked to the natural world for design inspiration.  A few months ago we profiled Blimp Bots at - intelligent floating robots that seemed to be inspired by Carl Sagan's gas planet aliens.  But what about looking at our own planet's beautiful moving creatures, the denizens of the deep ocean?

Festo, a German airship company, has been building airborne robots inspired by manta rays and jellyfish.  They someday hope to scale up these sky fliers to sizes large enough to move humans.  The Festo Air Ray is a manta ray-shaped helium filled RC airship that flies by flapping its wings. Watch the stunning video of the Air Ray in motion...

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 A Handy Robotic Arm

Two years ago, Dean Kamen was posed with a challenge by the Department of Defense: Create a prosthetic arm that can allow an amputee to pick up a raisin or grape off of a table, and know the difference without looking.  What makes this task so challenging is that it requires a two way signal to be transmitted - both a sensory signal coming from the metacarpals of the hand and a motor signal going to the prosthetic arm.  Moreover, these signals need to be done in real-time so that the grape wouldn't be squashed or dropped. READ MORE