Join the Robotic Football League

Are you ready for some football? Robot football, that is. Well, let these bots do the gridiron game for you. Join the Robotic Football League (RFL). Founded in Westminister, Colorado by Active Innovations, this new sport brings teams of robots to a competitive field for some football. These aren’t just any kludged together robots, either. The players in this league are derived from the AI-O1 robot built by Active Innovations. Featuring wireless communications, a PIC microcontroller, and built-in voice, the AI-01 can be configured as a passer, receiver, and blocker. The $119 robot can also be hacked into a “dream player” with a $19.95 RFL USB to AI Adapter from SparkFun Electronics. Designed for 2-bot, 3-bot, and 6-bot rosters, the RFL could be coming to an open 8-x16-foot floor or HobbyTown USA near you.—Dave Prochnow

(Image: Active Innovations)

New! The 5-Minute Project Series is Now a Video Podcast

Now you can get our five minute project videos delivered directly to iTunes or any other podcasting app. Subscribe here via iTunes, or use our RSS feed (http://popsci.libsyn.com/rss).

Some of you may be wondering what cruel fate may have befallen our brave podcaster Jonathan Coulton out on Lunar Base One. Well, a critical Doritos shortage after a lunar cargo supply chain error left Jonathan with a choice: continue to broadcast his weekly dispatches in solitude on the moon sans Doritos, or return to Earth to devote his full energies to being the interstellar rock star that he is, with the added benefit of all the Doritos he could eat. I think we can all see how the latter option won out. We wish our contributing troubadour all the best—you can still relive all the excitement via the same RSS feed in iTunes where every episode is archived.

We Have a Winner: The DIY Hydroponic Bog Garden

We are happy to announce the winner of our Go Green contest, thrown over on Instructables with the help from our friends at TreeHugger. The winning project details an ingenious way of further purifying the effluent water output of a sewage treatment tank (also designed by the contest winner's organization) and using it to grow plants in a hydroponic garden. Well done! Stay tuned here for more of our favorite entires, published in their step-by-step glory. Congratulations and thanks to all who entered! —John Mahoney

Green Contest Now Officially Closed

I just wanted to thank everyone who entered our "Go Green" contest over on Instructables—and everyone else who submitted great greening ideas to the original post's comment thread. We're thrilled with the great response we've gotten, and it'll be a tough job judging all the entries. Stay tuned here for the winner's announcement and several of our favorite projects. —John Mahoney

Bon Jour Folks

Hey, kids, Mike here (one of the How 2.0 editors). I'm going to be working from PopSci's little-used Paris office for the next month—OK, it's just an apartment I got by swapping mine with a nice Dutch film editor I found on Craigslist. But I've brought along a tech arsenal to test just how connected one can stay from across the pond and will be posting occasional dispatches on how it's going, along with any cool DIY stuff I come across here (like this odd three-seater bike). Any PopSci fans in the area, shoot me an e-mail at h20 at time4 dot com. See what's in my gadget bag after the jump. —Mike Haney

Meet the PopSci crew (and people far cooler than us)

If you live in the New York City area, come to our first meeting of the DIY minds at the Etsy Labs space in Brooklyn, Thursday, March 22 (that's tomorrow!). Phil Torrone of Make fame will be demonstrating and selling some of the Make kits, and Eric Singer, founder and director of LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, will show of some wacky electronic musical instruments, including something called the Sonic Banana. Get more detail here. Hope to see you there!

Enter the PopSci/Instructables "Use It Again" Contest

In honor of our new How 2.0 group on Instructables—the place to be for the coolest step-by-step DIY guides on the Web—we're launching what will likely be the first of many contests. And we're definitely kicking things off right—the winner will bag a new Canon 8-megapixel digital SLR and have their project featured in the How 2.0 section of an upcoming issue of PopSci!!

What kind of projects? you may be asking. It's simple. If you're like us, you're probably surrounded by all kinds of sci-tech detritus. Stuff that may be broken, outdated, random, whatever—it's all too cool to throw out but too weird to have any particular use on its own. Now the time has come to breathe new life into your old tech toys. Take any tech junk you've got around the house, bolt it together, and come up with something new and useful again (preferably while bellowing "It's alive! It's alive!" at your hunchbacked assistant).

If you've seen the "Repurposed Tech" feature in the pages of How 2.0, you know what we're talking about. More info is available over at Instructables, including the official rules and regulations for entering and examples of projects that would work. You've got until April 1, so get hacking! —John Mahoney

Link - Contest Instructions and Rules

Introducing the How 2.0 Blog

You've reached the new online blog companion to How 2.0, Popular Science's award-winning section that each month is chock-full of tips, tricks, hacks and do-it-yourself projects. We know it's a wild world out there in tech land, but never fear, for our crack How 2.0 staff will be here to keep you stocked with all the latest DIY goodness, including weekly projects by our resident hacker Dave Prochnow, handy how-to guides to help you use your tech gear better, and the best DIY tips from around the Web.

We've also partnered with Instructables—the Web's premier community for step-by-step illustrated guides to anything from cooking and cleaning a Dungeness crab to fitting a working PC into the shell of an old Nintendo. We'll be bringing you our favorite projects direct from our Instructables group, along with regular contests and special features. Watch for details of our kickoff contest in the coming days—you're not going to want to miss it.

Oh, and one more thing. This blog will have another very important feature: you. Know of a better way to tweak one of our projects? Jump in on the comments section found on each post. Or submit an Instructables project to our group—we'll be featuring our favorites here regularly. We look forward to seeing what you guys can cook up. Happy hacking! —John Mahoney