Steve Norris is the guy that brought us Stonehenge - A Robotic Digitial Clock that was all over a few months ago. Another project he has been developing is called RoboStool - Furniture. On-Demand. Robostool is a self-propelled foot stool that can ether follow you around auto-magically, move independently from point A to B or be controlled via remote control. Its brains are a Parralax Propeller chip and it sees using sonar and thermal sensing.

Lets Make Robots! is a site for with a single purpose, bots. One of the completed designs is done by Frits. He says this bot is cool because it uses off the shelf hardware, it is easy and it is cheap. I like it because he explains everything with lots of pictures. So without any more hype, I present “How to make your first robot.”

There are lots of write-ups for line follower robots, but they usually are complicated. First, the beginner is expected to learn a new microcontroller like a Basic Stamp or Arduino. Next they need to interface it with some servos which need to be modified for continuous rotation. Pratheek does away with that mess in his robot tutorial . All logic is controlled by transistors and the motors are simple electric ones with gear reduction. This project is well documented and includes lots of pictures.

I know the Crabfu Flapper was on engadget recently. I saw it and thought it was boring. I then looked at the rest of the site. There is some great shit! The details on the steam powered devices sparse, but it does give some great ideas. The motionworks section has more details and parts lists. You also see the use of Shapelock.