Baxter the two-armed robot, thermal drones, makerbots, and facial recognition

Baxter from Rethink Robotics

Rethink Robotics, founded in 2008, built a couple of robots (er, cobots) like Baxter and Sawyer that were designed to work alongside humans in a shared workspace. Back when I lived in the Bay Area my girlfriend worked for a VC firm that was an investor in Rethink, and they had one of these guys in the lobby that stacked cups indefinitely. Every once in awhile she’d have to go in to his little room and reset him, but from what I’ve heard it’s a pretty reliable piece of hardware. Rethink is no longer with us, but there still is hardware support available from the company that bought up the pieces. And if you are just getting into controlling larger robots, the safety features of a robot like Baxter will make it very difficult to die at his hand (the same can’t be said for the Kawasaki arms down below).

GE 900 MHz Radio Modems

If you’ve got a drone fleet that you don’t want to have to pay to outfit with 1000 sim cards, you could do a lot worse than these license-free 900 MHz modems. If you’re familiar with LORA-style low bitrate / long distance communications, this is an opportunity to get a ton of hardware talking to each other wirelessly. To be clear — these aren’t LORA compliant devices — they likely use a propriety comms protocol. But that’s ok, because 900 MHz is an ISM band that doesn’t require you to have a license to use, and you’ve got 84 of the damn things.

It seems like these were likely used for distributed water system telemetry. They look a little difficult to program, but that’s also half the fun.

P.S. — I just received my ham radio license, so you’ll start seeing some more RF equipment on the newsletter.

Kawasaki Industrial Robot Arms: FS030LC and ZZX130LB

Long time readers will know that I used to own a ZX130 arm from Kawasaki. Those same readers will also know that I don’t really recommend them unless you are slotting this hardware into existing Kawasaki lines, but these ones are worth a second look because of just how cheap they currently are. Don’t buy unless you’ve moved heavy stuff, and you have at least a foot of concrete to bolt these guys into. Controllers and pendants included!

Bonus section!

Also two separate Autel thermal drone auctions: 1, 2