When I used to work in Fairfax, Virginia as a computer consultant during the dot-com boom (actually I was a documentation specialist) we’d all go down to Pizza Hut for their lunch buffet. They had pizzas all laid out – three or four flavors, plus dessert pizza. A salad bar. I’d go with a bunch of people whose names I forget now (I didn’t make a lot of friends when I worked in Fairfax. I’d go for… → Read More
In the underground world of robotic tentacle makers, there are two rules: 1) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making and 2) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making. Both of those rules have been shattered by Matthew Borgatti, a robotics designer who has created a life-like, 3D-printed tentacle that flails around quite disturbingly using Arduino boards and a set of mini air compressors. → Read More
For your perusal: a Geiger counter made in the style of HR Giger. Why? Because this is the Internet and people do stuff for attention, that’s why.
The creator, Steve D of Mad Art Lab, bought a real Geiger counter from Adafruit Industries and wrapped it up in plastic bones from a skeleton model. A coat of black paint and some creepy pipes and he had a complete Giger counter that looked like a… → Read More
Some folks we met in Charlotte had a mission: they wanted to win a contest (sponsored by Red Bull) for the coolest Arduino project in the land. I think they may have nailed it. The project, built by engineers and designers for Edison Nation, turns an ordinary desk into a booze-infused party zone when the clock hits five (or when you slap the Swingline stapler.) → Read More
This video from Waterloo Labs shows a bunch of young, excited interns building what amounts to a computer-controlled Etch-A-Sketch. The project uses an Xbox Kinect sensor to find the nearest point in space and then transmits that motion to an Arduino board which in turn controls stepper motors to turn the Etch-A-Sketch knobs. Sure you could just turn the knobs yourself, but where would the fun be… → Read More
This complete project kit made by Adafruit allows you to print out things from the Internet. Want to print all your Tweets onto receipt paper? You got it. Want to print out your Facebook wall? Why the heck not! The kit uses an Arduino board and thermal printer and offers the opportunity for weekend hackers to pop together a cool little printer thinger and learn Arduino and Twitter programming. → Read More
An automatic scribbling machine sounds less than useful, admittedly, but it’s really just the style of line created by this motorized drawing machine. It’s reminiscent of ASCII art, in which heavier characters are used to create darker tones; in this case, the more jiggle added to the drawing platform, the more ink is put on the drawing surface. It’s kind of mesmerizing. → Read More
Every once in a while you see an invention that seems a long time coming. The Tacit, a hand-mounted system that pings surroundings and transmits distance information to the user, is one of those. While the reliable white cane and occasional accommodations for the blind and vision impaired ameliorate the difficulty of navigating the world sans sight, technological advances that are both useful and… → Read More
You’ve probably seen a few little gadgets and apps where you can wave it around and it spells something out on a long exposure, or draws a little picture. Pretty cool, but they’ve all been somewhat small — mainly good for painting stripes or single lines of text. The Mechatronics Guy’s “Light Scythe” is a two-meter bar covered in LEDs, and can be used to make man-sized graphics by moving it… → Read More
You can stick anything into a can. Peaches. Corn. (Very small) Apples. Or an Arduino board and potentiometer. The latter of those items allows you to create a playable pong TV pong game in a container the size of one of the old Pong paddles from the 1970s. While you won’t be able to eat the contents of the Cansole, you can make one yourself and play the age-old game of table tennis right on… → Read More
With Google’s Open Accessory Toolkit rolling up Android and Arduino together, there’s a lot of attention being given to to the popular hacking engine. But unsurprisingly, such a powerful tool isn’t really able to be just picked up and played with. Teagueduino is a modification of the Arduino system that makes the platform a bit more accessible to newbies. → Read More
Combining a Netduino Plus and a Geiger counter kit, a technical program manager at Microsoft named Fabien Royer created a tweeting radiation level monitor. Royer claims that his experience in France during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster has made him a bit tense when it comes to matters of radiation poisoning and government transparency. According to Royer, the French government downplayed the… → Read More
Minibloq is a programming language for Arduino motherboards designed to make it fun and easy for kids to make their own microprocessor projects.
How does it work? Well, it’s a bit convoluted but you basically plug in a board and program it using either graphical objects or text source code. It’s completely portable and runs on multiple platforms including the OLPC. The product will be technically… → Read More
Every few weeks I pop up out of the New York subway and forget where I am. I’ll start heading east when I wanted to west and north when I wanted to go south. East and west are the worst because it’s a long block before I usually realize I’m going the wrong way and, regardless of all of the potentially cues around me (street numbers, landmarks) I will invariably have to turn… → Read More
This 8x8x8 LED cube with 512 LEDs takes the old 3x3x3 light cube made up of 27 LEDs to the nth degree. This, certainly more time consuming project, actually involves a simpler design. By using a STP16CP LED sink driver, Nick (the creator), was able to reduce the component count. The LED sink driver can control 16 LEDs at once, as opposed to single LED control from the 3x3x3.
Programming came by… → Read More
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