Now there’s even more you can do with LEGOs, besides stacking them and plucking them out of the bottom of your feet. Microduino’s new generation of little stackable Arduino modules, mCookie, is both magnetic and Lego-compatible. If you thought you could do everything with Legos before, well, you were pretty much right, but now it’s a hell of a lot easier.
Ay visiting the strong online Lego and Arduino builder communities, you can find plenty tech online to ooh and ahh over. Microduino took the suggestions offered by those communities on their first campaign in 2013 and ended up with its mCookie modules, which are remarkably easy to use. Soon, Microduino’s mCookies are going to be available to everyone; the company is finishing up shipments to backers.
Since September 2013, when the first Microduino campaign grew to funding success on Kickstarter, the web community has grown by leaps and bounds. There are an increasing number of tutorials, instructions, and project suggestions available online, giving builders a greater support system. The Microduino wiki is growing page by page, and has about 75 tutorials posted so far to get users started.
There are a bunch of Arduino model kits out there, but they generally aren’t as simple or as flexible as mCookie. For example, Microduino’s quarter-sized mCookie modules connect magnetically, so you don’t have to solder connections. And their unique 27 pogo pin setup keeps damage to a minimum when you stack the modules.
And, of course the little circular connectors so familiar from childhood let you snap the modules onto Lego blocks. The holes on the mCookies also fit M2 screws so your designs will be tougher than if they were attached only with the Lego snap combined with magnetism.
The colors define the module categories, and do so with a clear inspiration from Lego. Red is for core modules, blue is for communication modules like Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth. Yellow is for functions like GPS and audio, and teal is for extensions like motors or amplifiers.
Arduino’s been around for 10 years, and its open source nature means there are a lot of projects already out there as examples. Easily available info and project plans make it a good fit both for pros building their own new designs and writing programs for them with Ardunio IDE, and for beginners working on basic downloaded plans using the Scratch graphic tool. The videos show how easy it is using a music player as an example.
Microduino Studio began shipping mCookies to Kickstarter backers in the beginning of September, and the firm just changed the order status from pre-sale to actual-sale on their website. mCookie Kits are set up like college classes offerings. 101 is the basic kit that comes with eight different module types: Core with USB, BLE 4.0, 8M, a hub, mic, buzzer, and two LEDcolor and Crash modules. 201, the advanced kit, comes with 16 modules, all of the basic kit plus an amplifier, audio, RTC, OLED, temperature and humidity, light sensor, passive infrared and infrared sensor modules. The 301 kit has every mCookie an expert could want, adding Wi-Fi, 10DOF, motor, servo, shake sensor, joystick, color detector, and duoV modules to everything that comes in 101 and 201.
The basic kit goes for $80, the advanced kit is $150, and the expert is $260. There’s also a family kit that comes with all three for $480.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.