Build a Tricopter to Inspect the Health of the Plants in Your Garden

Keeping up with a garden can be difficult and time-consuming, particularly if you have a large garden — even more so if you have a farm. Checking on every individual plant yourself requires a lot of labor, and a plant’s health isn’t always obvious just from looking at it with your unaided human eyes. Fortunately if you can see in the infrared spectrum, it becomes a lot easier. To do that on a large scale, you can follow Imetomi’s tutorial to create a tricopter drone to inspect your plants.

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Georgia Tech’s Shape-Shifting Robot Is Built From Smaller Robots Known as ‘Smarticles’

When building robots, we tend to think of using the same standard components — motors, actuators, limbs, and onboard computers — all coming together to form the construct. Researchers from Georgia Tech are changing that view by developing a large robot created by smaller robots known as Smarticles (smart active particles), which offer a potentially new locomotion technique. The tiny 3D-printed robots were designed with a pair flat arms that only do one simple thing, flap back and forth, but when five of the robots are confined in a circle, the nudge each other and form a larger robot, known as a Supersmarticle, capable of moving itself.

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Air:bit Is a Micro:bit-Powered Quadcopter Kit

Since its release in 2016, the micro:bit has been helping students take the first steps into the world of coding, and has spawned a number of interesting projects. Its built-in Bluetooth radio and accelerometer mean that it could even be used as the heart of a quadcopter setup, which is exactly what MakeKit is has accomplished with their aptly named Air:bit drones.

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3.5 Inch 60FPS Touch Screen For The Raspberry Pi 4! iUniker Screen + Case

In this video, I take a look at and show you how to set up the all New iUniker Raspberry Pi 4 Touchscreen, 3.5 inch 60+fps 480×320 Resolution HD Raspberry Pi Touchscreen with Cooling Fan and Case for Raspberry 4 Model B/Pi 4b. This is great for retro pie handheld projects or monitoring software for the new Raspberry pi 4! Let’s see how it performs. 

3.5inch 60FPS 480×320
3.5inch 60FPS 800×480

Raspberry Pi 4

This YouTuber Built His Own 8-Axis Camera Crane Robot

If you’ve ever wondered how cinematographers are able to capture those amazing dynamic shots where the camera is able to smoothly follow an actor as they move through a scene, the answer is often complex camera cranes. They’re usually controlled by an operator, but have sophisticated motor controllers to keep the camera stable. Unfortunately, those are wildly expensive and far out of reach for amateurs — and even many indie filmmakers. That’s why YouTuber Mingul decided to build his own 8-axis camera crane robot.

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Oracle Builds a Supercomputer with 1,060 Raspberry Pi Computers

Raspberry Pi is definitely the world’s most popular single-board computer brand, and that popularity is primarily a result of their low cost and small size. Those factors make Raspberry Pi boards ideal for compact projects, and for portable devices in particular. Oracle, however, has taken the complete opposite approach and built a supercomputer made from a cluster of 1,060 Raspberry Pis.

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The Probe-Scope Is a 60MHz 250Msps Oscilloscope That Fits in Your Hand

A year ago, electrical engineer Mark Omo unveiled his 1 Square Inch 20Msps Oscilloscope designed around a PIC32MZ EF, which used its internal ADCs in an interleaved mode to gain that 20Msps. It even had an integrated 1-inch X 1-inch OLED screen for the readouts. Now he’s back once again with another oscilloscope project, the Probe-Scope, a self-contained 60MHz 250Msps oscilloscope and probe in cable form factor — meaning all the acquisition hardware is contained along the cable.

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