OpenWarfare.org

With home fabrication becoming more of a reality every day it is only a matter of time before the average person has the capability to manufacture high quality firearms on their desktop.  The folks over at CNCGuns have some pretty cool toys and have decided to put them to use making ar15 style lowers and uppers.  If you have a nice CNC mill or $10,000 laying around you can download their solidworks models and build an upper and/or lower yourself.  I’m not sure about legal issues although I think as long as it is complient with state and federal laws and as long as you dont’ sell them you are OK…but don’t take my word on it.

I have always been a big fan of designs based on bugs.  Here is a new one that I founds at HackADay.  As you can see it really scoots right along.  It has pnuematic legs that are power by a master pump (I think).  I would love to see what kind of terrain it can handle.  You can see more at the projects page at Stanford.

One of my favorite pieces of 3D modeling software is Blender.  It is, in my opinion, the best open source 3D modeling platform out there.  I have been using it for quick and dirty data visualization for a while new.  It has Pythion scripting built in which makes it very hacker friendly.  I have even been able to set it up to pass camera output into OpenCV for quick testing in a virtual environment.  I was looking through the Blender 2.5 wiki page and cama across the Blender For Robotics page.  I would suggest checking it out.  One major missing piece in the DIY robotics world is a simple virtual environment for testing and rapid prototyping.  Source code for the demo shown can be found here.

I came across SenseFly.com while paroozing DIY Drones.  What I found particularly interesting is that they use optical sensors and directly map the “optic flow” from the sensor to control signals.  According to the original research site they have to estimate position and movement usign their method.  Check out their research site at the EPFL school of engineering if you are interested in more detail.

I guess it was only a matter of time.  This outfit is now selling plans for wifi enabled remotely operated gun turret.  I’ll be really interested to see what sort of legal issues they run into.  Because they are only sellign plans they are probably protected to some degree but the sellign of those plans might pose a problem.  Openwarfare.org could run into very similer issuse so they may be a valuable test case for us.

I came across the Complex Terrain Laboratory web site.  Pretty interesting articles.  They seem to center around technology and warfare so I thought it was apropos.