A few years ago, an Alaskan Bald Eagle was shot in the face, disfiguring her and obliterating the upper half of her beak. Rescue workers tried to rehabilitate the bird, whom they named Beauty, in hopes that her beak would grow back. It did not. Beaks are essential for preening feathers and feeding, and Beauty’s future was looking grim. Lucky for Beauty, she was taken under the care of Idaho raptor specialist Jane Cantwell, who spoke of Beauty’s case during an educational talk she was giving. In the audience happened to be mechanical engineer Nate Calvin, who was moved by the story and inspired to help. In the first attempt to create a prosthetic beak, Calvin made a mold of the missing upper beak, laser-scanned it, fine-tuned it in a 3D modeling program, and created the prosthesis of a nylon-based polymer. The procedure to implant the prosthesis is likened to fitting a patient with dentures, and there was a dentist on-hand to help. They started by placing a metal mount on Beauty’s existing beak, much like how a dentist would fit a post for a crown to anchor. Then the prosthetic was fitted on, and amazingly Beauty was able to preen and drink water that night. This story is not exactly breaking news, but it is definitely an unlikely and inspiring tale of engineering to the rescue! Here is a video profiling the case: You can also learn more on Cantwell’s site, as well as Calvin’s. Filed under: Conservation, Medical, Remake         
This grave-maintaining robot was conceptualized by Itamar Shimshony and built by Zvika Markfeld: As per Jewish customs, it places stones and flowers on the headstone, and occasionally cleans the grave with water and a cloth while patrolling around it. Hardware is based on an Arduino Mega 1280 sitting on top of a Roomba, and connected to a robotic Lynxmotion AL5D arm, a water pump, ultrasonic proximity sensor and the Roomba itself, of course. Most of the challenge was in getting the navigation around the grave right, since as I was loading the Roomba with more and more weight, its internal distance monitoring got skewed until it was rendered unusable. Eventually I came up with this combination of the bump sensors and the ultrasonic rangefinder, as I’m sure you can reverse engineer just by looking at the movement pattern. Other ideas that didn’t make it to the finish line were adding a video projector for the robot to show clips on the headstone itself, including those of itself while browsing Google and looking at mourning customs and dealing with post-traumatic disorders. Also, we thought of making the robot gradually loose its logic and sense of target during the day or the entire period, start running in circles (or whatever verb used to describe a moving Roomba), placing stones and flowers in the thin air, but eventually decided to drop it.
Also, be sure to check out Zvika’s Giant Bubble Generator in Make: Projects! Filed under: Robotics         For a few weeks, Antonin Fourneau has been working in residence at Digitalarti Artlab on the Water Light Graffiti project: a wall made of LED which light up when touched by water. After several tries, prototypes and material improvements, Water Light Graffiti was finally ready to take place for a few days in a public space, which happened to be Poitiers. From July 22nd to 24th, Poitiers inhabitants could discover and try Water Light Graffiti with the artist, the Digitalarti Artlab team and Painthouse, a graffiti collective, invited for demonstrations.
[via Adafruit] Filed under: Art, Electronics         More Recent Articles | |
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