Monday, March 22, 2010

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Mwaaah.


Hello Kitty (ハローキティ Harō Kiti?)[1], is a fictional character produced by the Japanese company Sanrio, first designed by Ikuko Shimizu. She is a staple of the kawaii segment of Japanese popular culture.[2] The character is portrayed as a female white Japanese bobtail cat with a red bow and no drawn mouth. She lives in London, England with her parents and twin sister, Mimmy[3]. Her first appearance on an item, a vinyl coin purse, was introduced in Japan in 1974 and brought to the United States in 1976.[4][5] This debut came under the Sanrio company lineup, where her various products are still developed and sold.

The Hello Kitty trademark has since spread globally and developed licensing arrangements worth more than $1 billion annually.[6] Examples of products depicting the character include dolls, stickers, greeting cards, clothes, accessories, school supplies, dishes and home appliances.[7] Her fame as a recurring Sanrio character has led to the creation of two officially licensed Hello Kitty theme parks, Harmonyland and the indoor Sanrio Puroland.

Amazing:D



Speecys SPC-101C
An elegant, sophisticated humanoid
for developers


22 degrees of freedom include the ability to tilt the
torso backwards and forwards and rotate its wrists.

22 Degrees of Freedom

Like many of the popular humanoid kits on the market, the robot stands 33cm (13 inches) tall and tips the scales at 1.5kg (3.3 pounds). But that's where the similarity ends. The SPC-101C has expanded the typical 16
to 17 number of servos (degrees of freedom) to 22. The additional servos provide much more realistic motion and give the robot the ability to mimic human body language very closely. For example, the robot can tilt its torso backwards and forwards at the hips just like a human. This capability saw practical use during our testing when we needed the robot's built-in camera to look at an object on the floor directly in front of it without losing its balance.

The video camera, mounted in the head, provides surprisingly good image quality. The camera can be panned using the head servo and adjusted up and down by tilting the torso at the waist. Dual stereo speakers are built into the torso sides and provide quite good voice and sound quality when the robot is still. Unfortunately, the whine generated by moving servos sometimes tends to degrade the overall audio experience a bit.



Specially designed LED arrays in the hands and chest provide the ability to display characters, text, or block graphics such as a big red heart under program control. Think of them as robotic emoticons. Speecys needed the mechanical design to be highly reliable and dependable, so they work- ed very closely with Futaba and selected the
proven RPU-50 CPU robot controller and RS301C servos. The controller and servos use RS485 Serial Communication that provides for querying the servos' positions, torque load, temperature and other parameters.

The robot is powered by a Futaba 7.4V 780mAh Futaba LiPo battery, or, for extended programming sessions, it can be operated while plugged into the charger. It was great to be able to run a long test sequence without having to constantly worry about running out of battery power.

To get new users started, the ITR Motion Editor for Speecys ships along with the robot and features an interactive 3D editor display window, timelines, the integration of audio and voice files, control of the integral LED displays and a broad library of poses and motion files to chose from.

Latest from Apple




Don’t be too happy that your Apple contraption (be it an iPhone, iPod touch or the upcoming iPad) is more or less capable of doing everything under the sun that a road warrior needs, otherwise there would not be room for improvement thanks to the genius of the folks at i-Got-it Corp., where they have come up with the launch and immediate availability of i-Got-Control. Surely you would ask just what i-Got-Control is – well, it comprises of a plug-and-play accessory which is capable of transforming your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad into a universal remote control, virtually giving you a free reign of any infrared device in your home, be they TVs, stereo systems and more. Hmmm, sounds interesting, but could the Gizmodo guys equipped with this zap away TVs at showfloors and conventions just like how they did a few years ago at CES?

The i-Got-Control will feature an industry-leading database of over 40,000 IR codes for consumer electronic devices worldwide, and its associated iTunes app is able to support a nearly unlimited number of IR electronics globally, virtually making it a snap to take control anytime, anywhere. Thanks to the inclusion of i-Got-Control’s built-in IR library, you will be able to CONNECT, SELECT and CONTROL your A/V components in a jiffy without having to worry about issues such as the lack of a Wi-Fi network, wires or batteries.

If you are adamant on getting started with this, then just download the free i-Got-Control application through iTunes, hook up the compact accessory to an iPhone (OS is 3.0 or higher), iPod touch or iPad, launch the i-Got-Control application and you are good to go once the selection process of the device is complete. Selection is painless thanks to pre-defined, user-friendly screens that ought to give you full control in a jiffy thanks to a highly intuitive user interface. Just in case of the rare occasion of not finding your device’s IR code, the i-Got-Control’s user-friendly learning capabilities will let it learn so in a snap. Interested parties might want to think about forking out $69.95 for the i-Got-Control.