So seeing as the denizens of SuicideBots have a think for Kraut rock, eclectica and robotics, the delightful Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid sent me this Muxtape this morning:

Muxtape apparently is the future’s substitute for sitting around late on a Friday night, mucking around with your dad’s stereo equipment, making that special mix for the cute person in Biology so they’ll share your, um, headphones with you later. Only you can do it in like, seventeen seconds, instead of spending hours trying to figure out why the aux isn’t talking to the receiver and looking for that one cable with the thing on the end that you need ’cause the amp is some weird european thing that doesn’t interface with any of your other components ’cause Dad is a sound nerd and said the sooner you figured it out yourself the better off you’d be, and something chewed through your last good speaker cable so you have to use the shit ones and it’s a good thing the person you’re making it for is totally worth it, because the time you’ve already invested in this, the perfect mixtape, will probably cause you to have another panic attack in Trig because you’re underslept and didn’t do the homework, but it’s almost time for Dr. Demento so you have to take a break and that’s a good thing anyway because you’re pretty sure you blew something up turning the power on in the wrong order.

What was I talking about?

Anyway, listen to this awesome Muxtape by LaughingSquid, and rock out with your robot out.

OB Shop Tip: Music in the shop is important for productivity. Mr. Robotics finds hard rock good for concentration. The Head Rotor enjoys things like this. I personally like Rick Astley.

[Thank you Scott and Boing Boing]

UPDATE: Scott actually came across this playlist in his rss feeds this morning, but didn’t make it himself. Sorry for any confusion!

I was digging around on Instructables when I found this neato link submitted a while ago for Society Of Robots. It’s a bunch of tutorials, advice, and places to satisfy your DIY robot needs.

They also have some good advice about funding.

Their FAQ strums my heartstrings because We here in the RoBunker suddenly have an intense feeling of not being the only people who get asked these very same questions all. the. time.

So go check them out, give some good advice on the Robot Forums, and be gentle to the noobs, you were one once too even if you have blocked the memory out.

. . .from the bearer of a *very* sore thumb:

Could you please remind Mr. Learns-his-lesson-and-always-pays-attention what Shop Tip #3 is?

Shop Tips, kids. Love them, learn them, use them.

One of the smartest people and brightest lights in the mechanical art arena has had a terrible accident.

Photo by John Mathieu Courtesy Laughing Squid

Todd Blair, of SRL, formerly the Exploratorium, Chico MacMurtry collaborator and many, many, many, many other fine projects, had a prop piece fall on him at RoboDock this year He is in a fine hospital in Amsterdam and is in a coma. We are all pulling for him to wake up and smile again.

There is a donation fund for him here, and a blog on his progress here.

Kick in a few bucks if you can. Todd is an artist and of course our culture is great at not enabling artists to be supported with all the benefits and etc a CEO or lawyer would have. We just have a surfeit of love.

Even if you don’t know him, he is one of those people that makes the world a little bit more amazing, and he and his love Alex can use your good wishes and everything else you have right now.

Tip of the hubcap to qDot from whom I stole the idea.
Dude, I looked and looked but couldn’t find it on your site…so I made one meself.
.

So it seems that during the last fight of the day, Brutality versus Last Rites, Brutality got a little enthusiastic.

Both robots are horizontal spinners with a ton of torque behind them, and during one golden moment, Brutality caught Last Rites juuuust right. Last Rites sheared Brutality’s 55-pound tool steel blade, flung it into the side of the arena, and blew a nice hole in the polycarb.

Bugger.

Our crack team of Arena Repair Gnomes is hard at work right now repairing the damage and double-paning the judge’s wall.

We’re going to be spending a leetle more on polycarbonate than strictly necessary, but the arena will be way over-engineered for RoboGames, you betcha.

Here’s a picture of Paul and Ray, showing off their handiwork:

We are very proud and amazed that they built such machines, and we’re looking forward to pacing the technology with the arena. We salute Team Brutality and Hardcore Robotics on their fine, fine craftsmanship.

Jerks.

It’s not often we have occasion to link to the august paper of record, but this New York Times article about home-renovation accidents is just full of excellent power-saw mayhem and nail gun fu.

As Mr. Barrett said, “When a medical professional in an emergency room gasps at your injury, it’s probably a bad sign.” The blade had sliced two-thirds of the way through his middle finger below the knuckle, and had pulverized the middle joint.

A question regarding his project: Those skinny little pieces of wood trim — can’t you just buy them?

“What are you, a wise guy?” Mr. Barrett said.

So read on, campers, and remember not to leave the nailgun on top of the ladder. NYT link has been Rotored so registration not required.

Over here at SB, we love power tools almost as much as we love fembots, so we were pretty stoked to find a blog dedicated to exactly that. Um, tools that is. Presenting Toolmonger, where besides the usual rundown of nailguns and suchlike, they often feature things the Rotor didn’t even know he wanted (like the Car Rotisserie), and they are certainly not above a little tank donut action now and then.

Check out this cordless electric lawn mower: is that not just begging to be hotrodded into a combot?

A great run of interesting and informative posts here the last few days. Sorry about that! To remedy the situation, we bring you this report (from the ever-reliable UK tabloids) about a a bloke who has sex with cars.

Chris said: “It’s all about imagination and creativity. There’s more to car love than exhaust pipes. Stroking the body panels and delicate touching makes excellent foreplay.”

If you want to make a creepy-ass robot, boy have these folks got eyes for you. Looks like they come in sizes all the way up to nearly an inch across.

Apparently for some kind of kinky Asian doll fetish thing, they come in all kinds of anime-Japanese-schoolgirl variations including iridescent, purple, and cat. Betcha you could fit one of the big silicone ones around a camera. Here’s looking at you!

I love this caution:

When you leave Takumi Silicon eyes out of your doll’s head for a long period, please store them in a sealed container away from direct sunlight, high temperature and humidity.

“Honey, what’s in the jar?”

Pedant alert: Remember kids, silicon is the semi-metallic crystalline element, silicone is the polymer family that includes lubricants and squooshy rubbery things. Repeat after me: silicon wafers, silicone implants. Silicon wafers, silicone implants. …

Oh God.
I love this place.

Ever needed a radio-controlled spider? Where can you find glow-in-the-dark maggots? Why do you need GITD maggots? The catalog knows exactly why:

Our each is a bag of [48] sickly-pale, squishy-soft rubber maggots - enough to infest your sister’s bedroom from floor to ceiling to under the pillow with plenty left over to stick in her yogurt.

How about a spring-loaded popping eyeball toy for LESS THAN A BUCK?

What is this cornucopia of crap? It’s American Science and Surplus, and if you are a craphound it will r0×0r your s0×0rs. It’s a happy (though unpredictable) day when the AS&S catalog arrives in the Rotor’s mailbox, complete with low-budget illustrations and frequently hilarious product blurbs.

Oh yeah. Robots. They got robots. Mostly toys, and mostly REALLY cheap, for example this dancing robot, or this micro-bug, or this hexapod monster kit, or this line-tracking mouse. And the priciest of those was what, forty bucks? Did I mention the cheap thing yet?

And they even have a special section of robot parts, including motors, lead-acid batteries (new, not surplus), and solar cells as cheap as you are likely to find ‘em.

What else? Laboratory glassware (at this point, the Rotor’s glassware fetish likely has the Feds convinced he is running a meth lab [I'M NOT GUYS, OK!?!] He also recommends the 50-ml beakers as an elegant vehicle for serving those fine postprandial liqueurs and single malts, or in the absence of those, Jägermeister.)

For those with a scientific-industrial fetish, there’s all sorts of lab coats and rubbery goodness. Have you ever seen anything quite as sexy as these gloves? Thought so. Other protective couture, includes chemical boots and Tyvek shorts. Hang on a minute. Tyvek shorts?? WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING OUT THERE THAT REQUIRES TYVEK SHORTS? Hold on — they are only a dollar a pair? Plonk in the shopping cart — I’m sure they will come in handy for something.

What else? Tools. Yes, all sorts of tools, including dental tools for you DIY dentists. (Also handy for scraping solder blobs or mis-applied epoxy).

If you swing the other way and like to play doctor, don’t feel left out. They have cheap latex gloves and — get this — a working stethoscope for six clams. “I’m ready for my examination now, doctor!”

There’s even a stethoscope for cars. Or bots. Kinky, eh? Six clams. How can you go wrong for six clams?

AS&S, I salute you, you restore my faith in the universe as a sublime fountain of abundance.

Cool build-it-yourself robot kits from CMU. Looks like they are intended mostly for telepresence (as opposed to Combots), but would serve fine for a beer fetcher or hockeybot, and are reasonably priced: TeRK Telepresence Robot Recipes. (And Qwerkbot, better tidy up with some zip ties before MomBot catches you: “Junior, you’re not going out with your wires looking like that. You’ll snag your power cable and then you’ll be in trouble!”)

For brains, they use the QWERK board from Charmed Labs, a special Linux ARM9 board with built-in motor drivers, servo outputs, webcam input, and wifi support. Though the $330 pricetag is substantially more than comparable single-board computers without the motor/servo support, it’s not far from the perfect mix of features for a dedicated bot brain, and there’s a lot to be said for not having to do the glue logic yourself.

You might suspect it’s all shiny happy flamethrowers with a Krautrock soundtrack here at the SB bunker, but now and then we like to take the safety pads off our actuators and shred something real good. Today’s target is Microsoft Robotics Studio, which sure smells like another attempt by everyone’s favorite software monopoly to lock you into using their overcomplicated and incompatible development environment. Flames commence after the break; stay clear of the stripy yellow zone lest you get hit by fragments.

I hereby release SB from liability from injury due to gratuitous flamage
(more…)

The conversation that transpired during the Thanksgiving Weekend Robot Building Bonanza:

“Hey Dad check this out.”

“Wassat sweetie?”

::FWOOSH::

“WHOA!”

::FWOOSH::

“Say, uh… Miss SuicideBots?” interjected Mr. Robotics. “You, uh.. wanna stop that flamethrower?”

::FWOOSH::

::rip cable::

::FWOOoos…::

“Oh. Huh. Hey Mr. Robotics, the code for the flamethrower worked. The solenoid’s still a little wonky though.”

“Hm. That explains the puddle.”

“Hey Dad? I think the coffee table’s a little singed, sorry about that. . .”

“Yeah and you’re going to have to repair that fuel line. . .”

“Yeah, that little bugger packs a punch when it’s angled wrong, doesn’t it. . .”

This brings us to a handy-dandy yet perfunctory Shop Tip #4:
When working in someone else’s living room, please note the locations of the nearest fire extinguishers.

[This and much much more, including build notes and pictures, once we get a little cleaned up around here. . .]

[WARNING: this post has an image that some people might find squicky. Proceed with caution.]

Occasionally we here at Suicide Bots, like all the other people who work with tools and things, learn things in the shop that just cannot be taught any other way.

For example, say you had 1800lbs of lumber fall on you a while back. Say that today you happened to have been standing on a hard concrete floor all day, noodling with something or other, and you realize that the ankle you broke back then is really super swollen because you are a stubborn git who took his cast off at the first available opportunity (hypothetically, of course, WE don’t know ANYONE who would do THAT around here. . .).

You don’t have an ice pack and you can’t really perambulate around to get one, so what do you do?

Ladies and Gentleman, I bring you Shop Tip #2. The voluptuous curves of a plastic Coke bottle make a a stunning and ergonomically sexy ice pack to put some cold on the ankle right where it’s needed:

Right, I suppose I should mention Shop Tip #1. Shop Tip #1 was established before this site went live. Shop Tip#1 is the hard and fast rule that whenever you are stacking something (like oh say 1800lbs of melamine-coated pulp board) for PITY’S SAKE stack in such a way that it cannot fall on top of you when you are not looking.

It’ll take a couple extra minutes, but trust me it will save roughly six weeks, two titanium pins, several rounds of ineffective painkillers, and the embarrassment of having your significant other chasing the autonomous medication dispensary around the hospital with a camera phone:

Okay shop nerds, anyone have any other tips they care to share with the class?