Here’s an interesting Roomba hack we haven’t seen before. The GåågleBot is a modified Roomba that will still do your home cleaning, but it will also collect data while on the job, taking photos and analyzing data for future searches.

With integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the GåågleBot allows you to search for things using text strings. I have to make one of these for myself. Pretty cool.

[hackaday]

There aren’t too many people out there doing great vintage robot mods, but YouTube poster robothut has created this awesome robot named Fire Chief from a Chief Smoky robot. It actually sends smoke out of the fire hose nozzle. Here’s what he has to say about it:

So here is my version of the Fire Chief robot. The firs effect in the chest turned out very well, I used a rotating wrinkle foil drum that colored lights reflect off of just like the fake fire units do, but again the digital camera does not like to shoot in to the lit effect. The smoker hose effect turned out great! The tip of the hose is the smoke fluid cartridge so if need be it can be replaced , the hearter is on the end of the hose and the power to the heater runs inside the hose. The hose is fed air buy a small air pump that came from a junked out blood pressure machine.

The video below is worth checking out.
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Ever wonder how those human-looking Cylons sleep at night? Well, apparently they cuddle up with this guy and dream of electric sheep. A real human cuddling with this Cylon Teddy Bear? Better sleep with one eye open. Another video below.
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Making row upon row of dominoes is harder then it looks. It’s also tedious and boring. Thankfully, the Lego Domino Row-Bot Building Machine makes it easy. Matthias uses a motor from a recycled tape deck to keep the DIY machine moving forward while it spaces each piece equally.

That makes it as easy to build as it is to set in motion at the end. Check out the video below and be thoroughly impressed.
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Another Doctor Who fan, another life-sized dalek. Rob Bosher built himself a full-size Dalek replica. And he did it all by himself. The above image suggests that it’s great exercise. This thing cost him around £700 and is made from wood and scrap.

It is an electric wheelchair based, joystick controlled Dalek, with a voice modulator for that authentic Dalek voice. The eye on the eye-stalk is made from a magic eight ball, and it has working lights. Most importantly, it looks awesome.

[GW]

A team of developers had some fun hacking five Roombas to create a new version of the Pac-Man game. The Pac-Man bot sucks up white rectangles while being chased by robot Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. When Pac-Man finds a power pellet the ghostly Roombas turn blue and start running away.

It’s meant to be a demonstration of the developers’ Unmanned Aerial System suite, designed for guidance of airborne vehicles. Check out a video below.
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Remember ThingamaKIT? Well, Jeff-o wanted to make a plush robot for his 2 year old daughter, so he used a Bleep Labs’ Thingamakit and Thingamagoop synthesizer noise maker. The end result is absolutely adorable and goes beep beep boop all over the place.

He has instructions to show you how to do it as well should you want to try your hand at it.

[Instructables]

Sometimes the Jawas do a really crappy job restoring a droid. They just patch it up and sell it to the Tatooine locals. But this one was created by Popular Science reader Brian De Vitis and holds not one, not two, but eight consoles, a sound system, and a projector. Pure awesomeness. It all began with an R2-D2 shaped cooler that he modified.

Then the consoles were gutted to rearrange the controllers inside so all the ports could face in the same direction. He still had enough space inside for a projector and a sound system, so what the heck. Had Jawas tried this, it would have had only a Wii knockoff installed and some farmboy would be really pissed at what he paid.

[SB]

This is the tale of a modder named Carl who has developed a robotic partner that not only rides with him on this tandem bicycle, but also helps him pedal. A PMG-132 electric motor is connected to Joules the bot and helps him pedal the bike for as long as his master desires.

Video below.
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Check out this papercraft Wall E that lets you know when you get an email. Dubbed “Mail E”, this little bot is actuated by three 9g mini-servos and controlled by a SD21 servo driver and a picaxe 18x.

Enough to make the head and hand move to alert you and its creator adds some wireless connectivity, Wall-E can leave the desk and make certain gestures to mimic the kind of email that he has received. We love it.

[SB]