Collaborate Disseminate
Ten years ago, François-Alexandre Bertrand had an idea for a novel watercraft that cruised to a site and then lowered its passengers below the water to have a look around. We got to see the first renders in 2011, a working prototype followed … Continue reading Novel above/below Platypus watercraft navigates from dream to reality
You know those cool photos that are half-above the surface of the water, and half-below it? They’re called split shots, and a new underwater housing is designed to let you take them using a wide variety of smartphones…
Continue Reading GDo… Continue reading GDome Mobile lets smartphones take "split shots"
More and more people are utilizing their smartphones for underwater photography, but there’s a problem with using a watertight housing made just for your device – it’s useless when you change phones. The Xpoovv, however, works with a wide ran… Continue reading Xpoovv underwater housing fits a variety of smartphones
Back in 2013, we heard about an all-terrain walking robot known as RHex. Designed in a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, it used six flipper-like legs to scamper around. Now, its successor is taking t… Continue reading Flipper-legged robot runs, swims, and is ready to hit the bigtime
As hackers, our goal is to reuse something in a way in which it was not intended and [Rulof Maker] is a master at this. From his idyllic seaside location in Italy, he frequently comes up with brilliant underwater hacks made of, well, junk. This time he’s come up with a wind-powered pump to move air through a hose to a modified scuba mask.
The wind turbine’s blades look professional but you’ll be surprised to see that they’re simply cut from a PCB pipe. And they work great. The air compressor is taken from a car and the base of …read more
This unusually mobile species of sea cucumber has only been captured on film once before, in the Gulf of Mexico. Continue reading Watch This ‘Headless Chicken Monster’ Crawl the Deep Southern Ocean
We love a little outside-the-box thinking around here, and anytime we see robots that don’t use wheels and motors to do the moving, we take notice. So when a project touting robotic fish using soft-actuator fins crossed the tip line, we had to take a look.
It turns out that this robofish comes from the fertile mind of [Carl Bugeja], whose PCB motors and flexible actuators have been covered here before. The basic concept of these fish fins is derived from the latter project, which uses coils printed onto both sides of a flexible Kapton substrate. Positioned near a magnet, …read more
Continue reading Flexible PCBs Make The Fins Of This Robotic Fish
Someday Elon Musk might manage to pack enough of us lowly serfs into one of his super rockets that we can actually afford a ticket to space, but until then our options for experiencing weightlessness are pretty limited. Even if you’ll settle for a ride on one of the so-called “Vomit Comet” reduced-gravity planes, you’ll have to surrender a decent chunk of change, and as the name implies, potentially your lunch as well. Is there no recourse for the hacker that wants to get a taste of the astronaut experience without a NASA-sized budget?
Well, if you’re willing to get …read more
Continue reading Underwater VR Offers Zero Gravity on a Budget
It’s pretty surreal to watch all these fish congregate around the data center like it’s an artificial reef. Continue reading Watch Fish Swim By Petabytes of Data at Microsoft’s Underwater Data Center
[Festo] have come up with yet another amazing robot, a swimming one this time with an elegant propulsion mechanism. They call it the BionicFinWave. Two fins on either side almost a body-length long create a wave which pushes water backward, making the robot move forward. It’s modeled after such fish as the cuttlefish and the Nile perch.
What was their elegant solution for making the find undulate? Nine lever arms are attached to each fin. Those lever arms are controlled by two crankshafts which extend from the front of the body to the rear, one for each side. A servo …read more
Continue reading [Festo’s] Underwater Robot Uses Body-Length Fins