James Bond Theme Song Performed By Quadrotors

5 March 2012VideosAlistair Lattimore

Last month I wrote about some small quadrotor helicopters that could do some pretty incredible things that were developed by the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

The two engineers from University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev who formed KMel Robotics are at it again & this time they have their quadrotor helicopters playing the James Bond theme song!

The quadrotor helicopters aren’t being controlled by any humans and the entire performance has been programmed by the engineers. Throughout the demonstration you’ll see them play a keyboard, drums, maracas, a cymbal and custom guitar built from a couch frame.

Next I want to see the duo do something crazy but with real world implications, such as search & rescue in small confined spaces or synchronised large area surveillance so that collectively the swarm are maximising visual coverage by co-ordinating their collective viewing angles.

Debris

2 March 2012TravelAlistair Lattimore

On the way home this evening from work on the M1, I noticed something on the road very very briefly three or four cars in front of me.

While I slowed down to try and avoid whatever it was on the road it didn’t help because the car in front of me hit the motorway debris and it kicked up.

Next thing I know I have a 50cm x 100cm piece of cardboard stuck to the drivers side of my windscreen nearly completely blocking my vision.

Fortunately I was able to reach the edge of it from inside the car and pull it to the side so i could pull over with hitting anything else.

2011 Traffic Statistics

9 February 2012WebsitesAlistair Lattimore

In keeping with my annual review of things and following on from my 2010 website traffic statistics, below is a quick summary of what happened during 2011.

Throughout 2010 my blog took 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews and for the year of 2011 108,325 visits and 140,882 pageviews. It is nice to see that my sites visitation has grown over the year, however it is a long way from the hay days of 145,000 visits when I was writing technical style posts and a mixing it with pop culture items like Australian Idol.

Breaking down the traffic sources for the year, shows a 4% increase in search engine traffic as a percentage of the whole site, up from 74% to 78%. Within the search engine space, Google continues to completely dominate, increasing by 2% to just under 96%. Despite every effort made by Microsoft, such as buying the search engine business from Yahoo! in an attempt to gain market share – it isn’t reflected in the traffic for my blog and collectively Bing & Yahoo! represent about 3.5% of my search referrals.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to the past years, with the a cute Ragdoll cat photo edging its way into the list:

Ignoring posts I’d written in a previous years and isolating only 2011, a different picture arises:

Bring on 2012, with a bit of luck the landscape will have changed by then again.

Nano Quadrotors

6 February 2012VideosAlistair Lattimore

In January 2010 I wrote about an amazing radio controlled four rotor helicopter known known as the Parrot AR.Drone, which utilised the iPhone gyroscope, touch screen and built in wifi to produce the most amazing flying toy I’d seen at the time.

Two years have passed and now the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania with development by KMel Robotics have miniturised the same basic concept to produce nano quadrotor helicopters.

As you’ll see in the video, a lot has changed and they possess some amazing built in technology, such as being able to right themselves when thrown into the air, along with clever algorithms to control moving between obstacles, flying in formation and much more.

I think this is absolutely mind blowing, least of which because they’d make an amazing toy but mainly because it represents a huge leap forward in robots and sensing, a lot like the self driving cars that Google have developed.

Amazing.

Dusty

23 January 2012HardwareAlistair Lattimore

Intel CPU & Heat Sink Clogged With Dust I got home from work and Hugo met me in the garage like normal and he says to me:

I’m grumpy!

After checking with Claire about why he might be grumpy, it turned out it was because the computer kept freezing when he was trying to watch one of his favourite shows via ABC 4 Kids.

Claire tells me that it did it a few times and that at some point, the computer was giving her a temperature warning – which I haven’t seen since the days of overclocking CPU’s.

A quick investigation shows that the fan & heat sink for the CPU are covered in dust. The photo probably doesn’t do it justice but the heat sink is completely filled in with dust and the fan blades are coated as well.

I clean everything up with a small stiff bristle paint brush, which Claire graciously let me use and we’re back in business. Claire walks past the computer and on the way to the bedroom tells me that the computer is making a weird humming sound.

Further investigation shows that it isn’t anything usual except that the CPU fan can actually spin properly now as it isn’t being restricted by the dust between it and the heat sink and the additional weight of it caked on the underside of the fan blades.