When President Barack Obama was inaugurated as this nation’s 44th President, he not only made history as the country’s first African American president, but history was also recorded using a special gadget called the Gigapan. The Gigapan is a computer controlled rig that can allow photographers to remotely shoot high resolution images or take time lapse stop motion video over long periods of time.  Sadly, the real McCoy is pretty pricey at about $900.  Unless, of course, you’re Lego obsessed, like photographer Jim Catan, and can create something very similar with a pilot of plastic bricks and Mindstorms interface at a fraction of the cost.

The rig was designed and built by Lego fan James Catan, who spent three days piecing together a rotating rig from varous Lego sets including the computerized Lego Mindstorms, which comes with a keypad interface for programming what you build to make simple movements in sequence.  The rig was built as part of a commission for a site Catan contributes to called Hacked Gadgets. But it wasn’t easy for Jim to get it right.  But being a prototype engineer with over 15 years of experience, Jim was able to lean on the familiar ground of trial and error.  With something as complex as programming movement, he had to put together and take apart his design several times in order to ensure both a snug fit of all the necessary pieces and to make sure the pieces stay together during the start and stop of the program sequence. But that was the easy part.

Once Jim had the basic design dialed in, he had to write the program which would cause the pan and tilt rig to move precisely and stay within the focal range of the lens he was using.  If off by even a few millimeters, there would be a gap in the photo which would necessitate reworking his program to cover the blind spot.  In the end, for about a quarter of the cost of a real Gigapan (about $250 in parts), Jim had a bonafide home built tilt and pan photo system that rivals its manufactured cousin in both photo and video quality.  Check out these videos of the Lego Pan Tilt in action:

The videos were shot using 500 still frames over the 40 minutes with a frame rate of about 16fps, moving and shooting every 30 seconds.  And it not only shows just how robust and flexible Lego builds can be, but how much you can do with what amounts to a simple toy.  And with some experience, it shows that you can save some money with them to boot.

A crafty MIT student has, well, crafted a robot out of a desk lamp. Natan Linder’s LuminAR robotic lamp can display images and text via an embedded Pico Projector, helping with your homework. It also recognizes hand movements via a webcam, moving left when a hand swipes left, or playing a video. I totally want one. Check out the video to see it for yourself.

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In news both awesome and terrifying, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh implanted a monkey’s brain with sensors that allow it control a seven-axis robot arm. Two implants control the arm and hand controlling areas of the robot. The study is being used for development of robotic control systems for disabled humans. Check out the video to see the monkey in action.

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Don’t watch this video before you go to bed — LittleDog is a DARPA project centered on building a robot that can traverse rough terrain, bringing supplies to soldiers and doing other dangerous things. DARPA’s created a video to show off the LittleDog’s latest updates, including spanning chasms the length of its body.

Yes, it’s incredibly impressive from a technological standpoint. But do you want one of those things lumbering toward you in the middle of the woods at night? Me either.

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Dean Kamen, an inventor and tech enthusiast, was on The Colbert Report last night to show off his latest invention: a super cool robotic arm.

The Luke Arm (a Star Wars reference, of course) is from DEKA Labs, and stands be one of the most advanced prosthetic devices ever created. DARPA is helping fund the project, in part to find a great replacement limb for soldiers that lose theirs in the conflict overseas. I love when technology serves a great purpose, and this is pretty high up there on the “useful” list.

Remember when I was freaking out over the concept of cyborg combat wasps?

Well, I’ve got something even more frightening here–apparently, the crew out at Harvard are neck deep in developing an entire colony of robot bees.

No biological material involved here, folks, just an entirely artificial, entirely mechanical robot bee.  The National Science Foundation handed over a whopping ten million dollars for Harvard to start building the ersatz honeymakers.  The bees will have realistic and flight-capable flapping wings, optical flow sensors to avoid collisions and for navigation, plus “pollination and docking appendages” as well as an as-yet-unknown power source.

Considering that honeybees have been going missing for most of the last couple years, a backup source of honeybees might not be a terrible idea.  But I find it vaguely horrifying all the same that we’re attempting to replicate nature with hardware.  Something just…wrong…about that.

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This thing is scary small boasting a 10 centimeter wing span.  Built-in to the nose of the robotic insect is a camera.  Check the video after the leap to see it in action, including an ‘in flight’ view.

Video after the ‘leap’

[Proteinos]