The contest was initially employees-only, but SparkFun realized it would be much more fun to have their customers join so that was what they did. Sixteen robots in all shapes and sizes – some ground, some aerial – participated in the race. How many of them finished? Two.

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Blurr they ain’t, and judging from the results we still have a long way to go before we see transforming vehicles. Watch the video and you’ll see that the teams already had their hands full just trying to stop their creations from killing themselves. The teams mostly failed on that account, but they still had a lot of fun anyway.

WIRED’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson’s team DIY Drones (pictured above) bagged first place. Their UAV clocked in at 36 seconds, while second-placed Deathpod 3000 (below) took nearly three times as long at 1 minute and 32 seconds. Which is kind of unfair really, because it’s a ground vehicle going up against a Decepticon plane.

Awesome. I wish we had more robot contests, like ASIMO versus a Roomba or something. These demonstrations are really comforting; at least we know we’re not going to be enslaved by robots anytime soon.

[via BotJunkie]

XBee 900 XCS and XBee 900 wireless modules send data over the 900MHz ISM band (which requires no FCC license), allowing for information to be sent over great distances. The XCS models can push data up to 15 miles away, but only sends and receives data at a pokey 9.6kbps. On the other hand, the 900 modules can still traverse up to 6 miles line-of-sight at up to 156kpbs (still not super-fast, but passable for transmitting small amounts of data). The boards are part of the hacker-favorite XBee module series, which makes it easy to connect these devices to a microcontroller like an Arduino for all sorts of custom applications.

Sure, most of us connect our PCs wirelessly at an access point, and let wires connect behind the scenes, but for completely wire-free projects (like sending private data between two offices across town on the cheap), these devices are some of the most powerful little devices out there. Wondering what else you could use these for? There are a variety of interesting XBee project ideas bubbling over on the SparkFun forums.

The XBee 900 series is available over at SparkFun Electronics. Maybe I’ll wire these up to the brains of my dog and my cat and see if they can transmit secret messages to each other from across town.

SparkFun’s newly redesigned portable rotary phone ($249.95 USD) has been upgraded to work with any Bluetooth phone. Just pair the “portable” phone with your cell phone, and you can send and receive calls on this old school rotary phone. Even the ringer, analog dial and dial tone work the way you’d expect them to. And since the phone runs on a powerful rechargeable Lithium-Polymer battery, you really can take it anywhere.

Now I just need a portable version of my Batphone, and I’ll be all set.

The game features a unique interface that controls the movement and rotation of the game pieces by pressing on square backlit LED buttons. The build team painstakingly assembled a grid of 240 buttons, 720 red, green and blue LEDs and 16 micro-controllers as well as a bunch of custom application code make it all work.

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Nothing like a little ingenuity to breathe new life into an old (but classic) arcade game.

[via MAKE]