Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Cool Projects [in "HD"]

Showing off a sampling of recent MITERS projects for a Japanese TV shoot:


The projects in this video are:
Also present:
For links to other cool projects, check out miters.mit.edu.


Twitch, Jr. is my twitchy little robot that can't decide which way it wants to go, so it just goes every way. The four-wheel linkage steering is based on a FIRST robot I saw on YouTube some time ago. Pneu Scooter, which wasn't really part of the TV show, is my silent/stealth electric Razor scooter with pneumatic tires, a direct-drive hub motor, and sinusoidal field-oriented control.

I'm also test-driving a new video setup here. I've been doing project video since...forever, but I've finally moved to HD. Well, sort-of. I will now shoot in HD with a new camera I get in a Cyber Middle-of-the-Night-Sunday deal that probably was a pricing mistake. It's a Panasonic HDC-SD60 which shoots 1080i onto an SD card. (We must be in the future...) It's also got a 25x optical zoom and image stabilizer, which is a must-have for me. Since almost all of my videos are destined for the web anyway, the outputs will still be relatively low-res 480p, but now they're widescreen on TechTV!

Since I had absolutely no HD editing capability, I also finally updated to Windows 7 and got Windows Live Movie Maker 2011. I was somehow able to update my operating system in a few hours without even signing off of Gmail... And WLMM11 supports HD formats, so I don't have to make a custom video converter this time around. Is it possible that Microsoft made something that just works? I'm still sort-of in shock.

More projects and more video await!

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