Gadget design, robotics, hacks, DIY technology and more.

UPDATE: Spam removed, security enhanced, spammer squished.

Spammers hit again! I realized very late last night that my website was hacked and was redirecting to some male performance enhancement sites. I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused on your side.

On my side, Goggle no thinks I am really into male drugs and there are a bunch of weird keywords all over the place. So far, I contained the damages but I still need to clean my WordPress php in order to remove any spammer-injected code.

Hacked

As a result, now I added a bunch of security features, most of which are invisible to the readers. A noteworthy and certainly not invisible feature is the use of CAPTCHAs in the comments and the login area.

For those who are curious, the spammer probably injected some redirects using the comments feature.

For the second Carlitos’ Project, I wanted to do something a bit more “useful” than pretty lights. So I decided that a speech controlled Arduino robot should be interesting enough as a project.

Speech-Controlled Arduino Robot

For this project, I used the DFRobotShop Rover (a mobile Arduino kit), the VRbot speech recognition module by Veear, two XBee modules, an Arduino Uno, two XBee shields and some other components. see the video below to learn how to do your own.

In order to get more information about the project, the required tools, materials and code, please visit the Speech-Controlled Arduino  Robot project page at GoRobotics.net. The code is also available over there.

If you are interested in making your own, have a look at the kit we put together with RobotShop.

So what about Nao?

I have been terribly Nao-centric for a while and this it not going to change today. While programming the robot, it can become very frustrating to say the commands over and over again. For this reason and also in order to produce a perfectly repeatable input, I programmed Nao 1337 to say the commands for me (yes , I am lazy, I know). See the video below to see how Nao performed.

Nao is a very expensive piece of equipment and It would be a shame if it got dirty, scratched or damaged. Nevertheless, the official Nao suitcase is prices at 777.77 USD. This is rather expensive A suitable alternative is the cheaper Plasticase Nanuk 945 which is as sturdy and IMHO much better looking.

As explained in the video below, I also use clear Duck tape to protect Nao’s surfaces. This tape is inexpensive, does not leave any residue and is very strong.

Also, as a follow-up of the video, in order to better protect Nao from the friction in the pelvic region, I use D-profile self-adhesive ribber tape (the kind you normally use in door frames to prevent air from coming in). Since it is white and mate like Nao it goes very well and makes for a nice belt.

Nao with rubber belt