Barry Crawford said that when he was a kid, he dreamed of growing up to be a robot. Sadly, his childhood dream hasn’t come true yet. But he did become what he calls a “gizmologist”, making mechanical artworks, furniture and jewelry. His latest ongoing project is the Mechateuthis, a crank-operated mechanical giant squid.
The Mechateuthis (named after the giant squid’s genus Architeuthis) may look like it’s made of old materials and found objects, but it actually has over 600 hand-fabricated moving parts. Its tentacles, beak and fin are operated indirectly by eight hand cranks that are situated on fence posts along its perimeter. An Arduino turns the motion of the cranks into signals for the sculpture’s motors, which in turn activate the various moving parts. Here’s Make’s interview with Barry at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2016:
Barry originally made Mechateuthis for Burning Man 2015. Here it is blowing people’s minds at Black Rock:
I’d love to see a desktop version of Mechateuthis. And a Godzilla-sized one.
[via Make:]
With barely two percent of the seafloor explored, we know a whole lot less than we'd like to about the Earth's oceans and its myriad of residents. Among the more numerous but less studied oceanic animals are soft-bodied like squid, octopi and jelly...
It seems like everyone's got a solution for workout tracking, these days, and the undergrad students at Northeastern University are no different. We traveled to the bowels of the Boston school's Egan Research Center, to try the Squid Shirt that we saw back in February on for size. Our own Terrence O'Brien donned the garb, and while the current prototype has dropped much of the unwieldy wires and suction cups that gave the wearable its name, it's still a bit of a production, taking several minutes to put on with the aid of assistant academic specialist, Mark Sivak (who assured us that the student this specific model was designed for had gotten the whole thing down to a two or three minute streamlined process).
The shirt has a total of 13 EMG sensors, monitoring data from three muscle groups: the pecs, lats and delts. Every signal requires two sensors (with one attached to the hip for ground), which are ultra cheap and disposable, meaning you can just toss them away at the end of each workout session. In addition to monitoring muscle activity, a standard Polar heart rate monitor slips into a sleeve inside the shirt to keep track of your pulse. The shirt itself is machine washable, which again is good news, if you plan on working out in the thing. This is due in part to the fact that the box -- the brains of the operation -- is removable. This also means that you can use a single box to plug into different garments, which could include things like workout pants in the future.
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Northeastern University Squid Shirt torso-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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