So, you want to do some hacking with your kinect…

If you have read any technology blog in the past few months, chances are good that you have seen an ever increasing number of blog posts about people hacking their Xbox Kinect to do all kinds of really cool stuff. If you are like me, you found yourself thinking ‘I have got a really cool idea to do ________ with my Kinect, I should see what this is all about!’. Problem is, there is no definitive entry point to developing software using the Kinect.
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Help! My air hockey table grew a robot arm!

AirHockeyproject Four blog posts later and we’ve arrived at the last nostalgia blog post in the series. Ready for the story about the air hockey table that grew a Lynxmotion robot arm and learned how to play? Great! In the fall of 2004, I signed up to take a Video Processing course as a follow-up to the Digital Image Processing (DIP) course I had taken with Dr. Oge Marques (BlogTwitter). As with the DIP course, the Video Processing coursework included a term project of our choosing. I decided that it would be interesting to extend the functionality of the DIP project somehow but was not sure quite what to do. At some point along the way during the brainstorming, I remembered a robotic air hockey table I had seen when I was touring a college a few years back. That particular robotic air hockey table worked by using sensors embedded in the table surface to locate the puck as it moved and feeding that information to a robot arm. I decided to see if I could simply the idea by replacing the embedded sensors with a cheap USB web camera …

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The world’s least expensive pipetting robot

In 2005, as part of a graduate course on robotics, the team of Melissa Morris, John Morris, Thomas Kelly and I set about repurposing a JOT automation system (http://www.jotautomation.com/) which housed a four axis Hirata robot (http://www.hirata.it/) and was donated to FAU from Motorola. The system, pictured below, was originally used to print and apply barcodes in the battery compartment of cellular phones. The goal of the repurposing was to complete a project whereby the system would be converted into a pipetting robot, capable of dispensing liquids into 96-well microtiter plates. This was accomplished on an extremely lavish budget of $0.

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Yet Another Wiimote Controlled Robot

As part of the Scripps Florida grand opening celebration in 2009, the volunteer robotics team at Scripps Florida was tasked with repurposing a laboratory robot for use as demonstration unit and an Educational Outreach platform. This volunteer team consisted of Lina DeLuca, Dr. Louis Scampavia and myself. The goal of this project was to create a hands-on robotic system which could be used to showcase the unique technology used in the drug discovery process and more generally, to generate interest in science and engineering.

Scripps Grand Opening - Science Education Day 057

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STS-132 NASA Tweetup – Tweet harder.

At the end of April this year, NASA announced a tweetup would be held at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX during the STS-132 mission. I had never been to JSC or to Texas for that matter, so it did not take much consideration to apply when registration was opened. Luckily enough, I received a confirmation email and soon had a flight booked. Continue reading…