GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Matt Richardson’s friend Lauren wanted a device to hold down the down arrow and physically scroll through Google Reader, like a sustain pedal on a piano. Matt built it for her using an old USB keyboard, wire, solder and a little DIY invention.

It’s surprising we don’t see foot pedals more often in mainstream desktop computing. They’re a natural, well-established interface: besides analog tech like pianos, drums, bikes or a spinning wheel, think of cars, table saws and electric guitars.

If you’re curious, there are plenty of commercial USB foot pedals available, mostly targeted for disabled users or industry-specific uses. For example, they’re extremely popular in professional digital voice transcription, often coming bundled with transcription or dictation software. These usually have three controls: play/pause (center), rewind (left) and fast-forward (right).

Musicians, too, continue to experiment with foot pedals: we’ve written about AirTurn’s Bluetooth sheet-music turner for iPad, with a special eye towards its potential for disabled users.

Other USB foot pedals are extraordinarily versatile and programmable. But because they aren’t a universal accessory marketed to mainstream users like a mouse or keyboard, all foot pedals tend to be expensive and often highly tailored to individual users’ needs.

Building a foot pedal yourself using a keyboard’s guts is one way to solve this problem. But I can’t help but wonder what a determined hacker could put together with an Arduino board, a weekend and a little imagination.

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Carlos Alberto is a carpenter in Portugal with a modernist bent, a love of motorbikes and a sense of humor. This is “Daniela,” a fully-functional Vespa-styled scooter built almost entirely from wood.

Most of Alberto’s projects are standard stuff: staircases, furniture. Some time ago, he built a wooden motorcycle, called “Mota.” With “Daniela,” he decided to document the building process on his website, from a bent plywood frame to motoring down the avenue.

Even after watching Alberto and his team move through each step, knowing that it’s possible for a maker to go from this:

To this:

Is magical. Check out some of the early detail work:

And the triumphant builders:

For another peek inside the production process of Italian scooters, this time in a very high-tech production line, check out this vintage video from Lambretta:

All images from Vespa Daniela by Carpintiara Carlos Alberto, via Make Magazine

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If you were wondering what to buy Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney for Christmas, her’s your answer. Send him a Mechanicard, a mailable greetings card which is also a handmade kinetic sculpture. Dylan is both a tinkerer and a sucker for cool stationery, so he’ll love it. Just don’t expect it to be a surprise – I’m pretty sure he reads this blog.

There are five different Mechanicards, from the Radial Engine seen in the picture above through the Strum-U-lator (plays music!), the Dragonfly Surprise (it has a dragonfly. Surprise!) and the wonderful Ambigulator, “featuring a hand-cranked optical effect, and a mechanism that asks more questions than it answers.”

The kits are all hand-operated with a tiny, supplied handle, and can be had fully made or in kit form. The kits begin at $45 assembled ($35 for the DIY option) and the prices rise to $75 for the more complex models. If you’re feeling stressed today, then go grab a cup (or cocktail glass) of your favorite beverage and watch the video of all the Mechanicards in action. It’s hypnotic, and very relaxing.

Mechanicards mailable sculptures [Mechanicards]

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To convert your SLR camera into a pinhole camera, you need only to take the body-cap and drill a tiny hole in it. This option, which uses the protective cap that came with the body, is free, and highly recommended for some photo-fun.

If you lack the skills to make a little hole in a piece of plastic, but somehow still have enough of a brain to have bought a camera and know how to use it, you could buy Photojojo’s $50 version, made from an actual Canon or Nikon body-cap. This pro-pinhole isn’t quite as dumb as it seems, but it’s still a little steep compared to Photojojo’s usually reasonable offerings.

The SLR Pinhole Body Cap has a small, countersunk hole at its center, and this hole is covered by a piece of opaque film. In the centre of this film is a tiny dot of transparent material. The advantage here is twofold: the tiny hole in the film is better than the ragged one you’d cut with your Dremel, and the fact that the hole is covered keeps dust off your sensor. The results can be seen in the gallery below.

I’m torn. On the one hand, this is a nicely made, fun accessory for your camera. On the other hand, you already own one, and $50 is a lot of money for something you could easily do yourself.

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SLR Pinhole Body Cap [Photojojo]

Photos: Photojojo

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Source:wired.com

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The MacArthur Foundation’s 2010 fellowship class honors 23 innovators, providing them with $500,000 grants, national recognition, and a few people throwing around the word “genius.” One of the fellows is Amir Abo-Shaeer, a teacher whose high school physics and technology curriculum centers on designing and constructing robots.

Abo-Shaeer teaches at Dos Pueblos High School in Galeta, CA. In 2001, he created the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy to challenge the idea that American high school students — and particularly high school girls — weren’t interested in science or engineering. Abo-Shaeer was a Dos Pueblos alumni, studied engineering at UC-Santa Barbara, and worked in aerospace and telecommunications R&D. He knew that this just wasn’t the case.

“My first class, there were 35 students, and there were two girls,” Abo-Shaeer says. He brought his female students to the junior high schools to directly recruit more girls into the program. The students attracted attention by aggressively competing in the FIRST Robotics international high school competition, while Abo-Shaeer secured grants to build up the school’s robotics lab.

Now, Abo-Shaeer says, “we’ve had a line out the door of people wanting to get into our program,” — which is now composed of more than 50% girls. This summer, the Academy began construction of a 12,000 square-foot campus that will let them triple their current enrollment. The Perfect Mile author Neal Bascomb is writing a forthcoming book about Abo-Shaeer and his program titled The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts.

Recently, Abo-Shaeer’s Academy augmented its physics and engineering program with entrepreneurial and business components. It lets students focus on not just learning the science and tech to construct robots that work, but thinking about practical use-cases, cost, and marketability.

In a recent article for the Atlantic, “School For Hackers,” Make Magazine’s editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder argues forcefully that these are precisely the skills students should be learning, that building robots and gadgets is the best way to learn them, and that the current push towards quantifiable assessment is squeezing them out of American education. “When a kid builds a model rocket, or a kite, or a birdhouse, she not only picks up math, physics, and chemistry along the way, she also develops her creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement with the world around her. But since these things cant be measured on a standardized test, schools no longer focus on them.” Let’s hope the MacArthur Foundation’s recognition of Dos Pueblos helps turn some of that momentum around.

2010 MacArthur Fellows [MacArthur Foundation]

Source:wired.com

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You’re a kid, and therefore you like to shoot things. But what if the catapult and the air-rifle just aren’t cutting it anymore? Then you, like Jason (aka Larsplatoon) make your own coil-gun.

The styling is straight out of a video-game, but inside the engineering is very real, and very lethal. A coil-gun uses a magnetic field to accelerate a bullet up to projectile speed. Jason’s uses a bank of recycled rechargeable laptop batteries to provide the juice, and various bits of circuitry to step up the voltage, prevent overloading and charge the array of capacitors. These capacitors are what you see in the cylinders at the back.

To use, flip the switch, hit the charge button and wait 30 seconds for the capacitors to fill up. Slot in the slug and take aim, and pull the trigger to fire. One charge is good for around 15 shots. As you see in the video, it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s no .457 Magnum. Jason’s gun will put holes in his various toys (and what looks like his mother’s toaster oven) but the fact that just a couple of cardboard boxes are need to protect the fence is a giveaway.

The gun uses 1.25kJ of energy to fire the bullet into the model-airplane (shooting commences at around the 2:50 mark), TV-remote or Mom’s best glassware, but doesn’t have enough force to kill anyone. If you want to do that, you’d do better converting this into a taser and sending the stored potential of those four 3900uF, 400-volt straight down a wire into some poor-schmuck’s body.

The project took Jason two years to complete. We say it was worth every geeky, blood-crazed moment. If I’d had the skills to put one of these together back in school, then those bullying jocks would have, well, they’d all have had broken TV-remotes, that’s for sure.

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Portable 1.25kJ coilgun finally done [4HV]

Portable 1.25kJ Coilgun [Larsplatoon / YouTube via Hacked Gadgets]

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Source:wired.com

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At some point in the future, many more everyday objects will have tiny embedded chips that can communicate with networks. But just as we’re debating net neutrality and the value of the open web vs closed client applications, we will have to decide who will control the internet of things, too.

Lines are already beginning to be drawn. Ashlee Vance, writing for the New York Times’ Bits blog, profiles chipmaker ARM’s efforts to bring the internet of things to the masses with its mbed project.

The goal of mbed is to make building prototype objects and programs easier for people who aren’t necessarily used to writing programs or hacking at the guts of electronic devices. It has two main components: a simple $59 microcontroller, and an online drag-and-drop program compiler. This user video by steveravet shows mbed in action, rewiring a Billy Bass novelty talking fish to say funnier things:

Ultimately, though, the idea is to create practical applications to help users in the field. ARM’s Simon Ford told the Times: I want to see how you get people to experiment. Maybe a washing machine repair man will figure out how to get the machines to report back to him and revolutionize the machines to get a competitive advantage. The point is that I dont know what theyll be used for.

Now, at Adafruit Industries’ blog, DIY-engineering all-star Limor Fried counters the Times’ warm enthusiasm for ARM’s approach with some ice-water skepticism: “mbed requires an online compiler, so that you are dependent on them forever. You cannot do anything without using their online site, ever.”

Fried adds: “We like the hardware in the mbed, the cortex series is great (its why we carry an ARM Cortex M3 board now) but the ARM compiler used with mbed costs about $5,000 so maybe it will never be anywhere but online.” Adafruit notes that similar ARM boards are available with entirely open-source libraries.

Free and open-source vs. ready-for-anyone-to-use out-of-the-box: we’ve been down this road many times before. I doubt this argument will have a clear winner and loser, but it’s important that it’s clearly framed and articulated now, before any one approach gets locked-in as the default option.

Source:wired.com

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Admit it: When you saw the puny touchscreen iPod Nano you thought, “That could make a cool watch.” Accessory makers thought so, too, and a handful of them are already selling fancy straps to turn your iPod Nano into a watch. The truth is you don’t really need to waste money on any of them, because you can do it yourself in two steps.

Really all you need is any fabric strap. The iPod Nano has a built-in clip on the back so you can just clip it on to the center of any thin strap. It’s a sturdy clip, too, so unless you go skydiving or regularly get in bar fights, it shouldn’t wiggle around much.

Check out our photos below to see how I converted my military watch (with a NATO watch band, which you can get for about $10) into an “iWatch” in two easy steps.

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Take your fancy military watch.

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Now the question is, when will we get FaceTime on a Nano? Then we’d really have that dream Dick Tracy or Jetsons watch.

Photos: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com

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Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power.

Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.

As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.

It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.

See Also:

• DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware
• Why Arduino Is a Hit With Hardware Hackers
• Beautifully Hypnotic Video Details Canon Macro Lens Hack
• Hacker Stuffs MiFi Inside iPad, Ruins it in the Process

Source:wired.com

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A small group of libertarians created their own, floating vision of the future in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta recently. It was, as organizers billed it, a little like Burning Man on the water minus the giant, flaming effigy and with a fraction of the number of event-goers.

The festival was almost canceled due to insurance problems, but in true libertarian fashion, the would-be attendees created a do-it-yourself substitute in its stead.

The would-be event, called Ephemerisle, was sponsored by The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to creating independent micro-nations in international waters.

“I heard about the cancellation and said, ‘In the spirit of self-organized nation-building, let’s get together anyways,’” said Matt Bell, who spearheaded the effort without any central leadership or organizational backing.

Supporters called their alternative, uninsured gathering “the not-Ephemerisle Floating Festival, or a Festival Formerly Known as Ephemerisle.”

Patri Friedman, executive director of The Seasteading Institute, attended the substitute event as a private citizen, not formally representing his organization.

“The high insurance cost is one of many examples of how the current political system in America makes it difficult to try new things,” said Friedman, who is the grandson of Nobel Prizewinning economist Milton Friedman. “That’s bad.”

He added, “On seasteads, we would have a wider variety of legal environments.”

Among the motley crew at the four-day festival were a bunch of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, a handful of international libertarian activists and two seafaring travelers who said they were homeless.

When participants weren’t trading visions of their utopian futures, they floated around and enjoyed art and music. Pirate accordionist Jason Webley and trapeze artist Miriam Telles regaled spectators. Interactive art bobbed beside the boats. And a heady gathering called “Memocracy Conference” gave festival-goers a chance to share radical ideas (or memes) about the future of biotech, telepresence, life extension, secessionism and robots.

According to Bell, the Festival Formerly Known as Ephemerisle gave participants the chance to practice forming their own societies.

“It’s like a toy version of seasteading that we get to play with,” said Bell.

For more background on the gathering, watch a short documentary about Ephemerisle from last year, and don’t miss this short animated history of previous attempts at libertarian countries on the high seas.

Above: Erin Rapacki discusses the future of artificial intelligence robots at the Memocracy Conference. Rapacki works for a startup company trying to commercialize telepresence robots Avatar-like robots that use video and robotics technology to let people be present from afar.

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Source:wired.com

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Using little more than a webcam and a laser, a young engineer has built a cheap 3D scanner that dovetails perfectly with the Makerbot and other desktop fabricators. It could be used as part of a copying system that would allow hobbyists to duplicate solid objects at home.

The technology exists to do this kind of thing, but its much more expensive, said Andy Barry, a research engineer in the Autodesk Innovations Lab at NASA Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, California. My goal is to make it really cheap, so we can build a million of them, and get it out to everybody.

Barry built the first model in only three weeks, during the beginning of his senior year at Olin College of Engineering. During his winter vacation, he constructed a second prototype. At Ames this summer, he has been using it to scan peoples faces and then print plastic replicas.

That may seem impractical, but he pointed out that the same technique could be used to replace damaged plastic goods.

You have a car part thats broken, you glue it back together and put it in front of the scanner, and then you can use that data to machine a replacement part, said Barry.

The scanner works by sweeping a red laser beam across any object that you can put in front of a webcam. When an object is close to the camera, the beam seems to shifted to the side. That provides a key bit of information about the depth of the point being scanned. With a bit of number crunching, a computer can use the position of the beam to calculate the thickness of that object.

Barry hopes to sell his invention through the MakerBot store for a price of around $200. It could be available early this fall.

Photo credit: Aaron Rowe

Source:wired.com

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If Stanley Kubrick had decided to make the plumbing in 2001’s Discovery One spaceship visible, it would have looked like this. These gorgeous speakers are hand-built by Etsy seller Ikymagoo, and are little more than cleverly-joined sections of PVC-pipe with a pair of speakers shoved in the ends.

The Ikyaudio Sea Cucumbers Audio Speakers use three-inch magnesium/aluminum alloy drivers in the ends, and the tail of the caterpillar-like curls has a hole in the end which acts as a bass-port. The amp is connected via binding posts (and you’ll need an amp – these speakers are unpowered) and Ikymagoo says they have a “nice sound and a very good sound stage, lots of low end bass for a small speaker.”

The Lady pegged them as Japanese in styling right away, and suggested I clear out the living-room and put in some tatami-mats, a couple cushions and these speakers. I would have to pay for this, of course, and the Ikyaudios are a rather steep $200 a pair, so I’d probably make my own.

Lucky for me, Ikymagoo has posted an extensive how-to on his speaker constructions At DIY Audio Projects, complete with a video of the prototypes in action. It actually looks pretty easy, but if you would rather get a pair of these instead, they also come in red and yellow.

Ikyaudio White Sea Cucumbers Audio Speakers [Etsy via Make]

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Someday humans and computers will meld together to create cyborgs. But instead of waiting for it, Martin Magnusson, a Swedish researcher and entrepreneur, has taken the first step and created a wearable computer that can be slung across the body.

Magnusson has hacked a pair of head-mounted display glasses and combined it with a homebrewed machine based on a open source Beagleboard single computer. Packed into a CD case and slung across the shoulder messenger-bag style, he is ready to roll.

A computer is a window to the virtual world, says Magnusson.

“But as soon as I get up and about, that window closes and I’m stuck within the limits of physical reality,” he says. “Wearable computers make it possible to keep the window open. All the time.”

Magnusson’s idea is interesting though one step short of integrating a machine inside the body. In 2008, a Canadian film maker Rob Spence decided to embed a tiny video camera into his prosthetic left eye. Spence who is still working on the project hopes to someday record everything around him as he sees it and lifecast it.

For his wearable computer, Magnusson is using a pair of Myvu glasses that slide on like a pair of sunglasses but have a tiny video screen built into the lens. A Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux and a Plexgear mini USB hub that drives the Bluetooth adapter and display forms the rest of this rather simple machine. Four 2700 mAh AA batteries are used to power the USB hub. Magnusson has used a foldable Nokia keyboard for input and is piping internet connectivity through Bluetooth tethering to an iPhone in his pocket.

Magnusson says he wants to use the wearable computer to “augment” his memory.

“By having my to-do list in the corner of my eye, I always remember the details of my schedule,” he says.

Check out photos of his gear:

The innards of the homebrewed machine are glued to a CD case. The CD case is slung across the shoulder by attaching it to a strap using velcro.

What the homebrewed computer looks like:

Photos: Susanna Nilsson

Source:wired.com

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Attention wannabe supervillains: Putting your own, personal satellite into orbit is not such a far-fetched idea after all. Interorbital Systems, which makes rockets and spacecrafts, created a kit last year that lets almost anyone with a passion for electronics and space build a satellite. The $8,000 kit includes the price of the launch.

The company is now ready to launch its first sub-orbital test flights in California next month.

“$8,000? That’s just the price of a cool midlife crisis,” says Alex “Sandy” Antunes, who bought one of the kits for a project that will launch on one of earliest flights. “You could buy a motorcycle or you could launch a satellite. What would you rather do?”

The hexadecagon-shaped personal satellite, called TubeSat, weighs about 1.65 pounds and is a little larger than a rectangular Kleenex box. TubeSats will be placed in self-decaying orbits 192 miles above the earth’s surface. Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver. After operating for a few months, TubeSat will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

“It is a pico satellite that can be a very low cost space-based platform for experimentation or equipment testing,” says Randa Milliron, CEO and founder of Interorbital Systems.

About 20 kits have been sold and 14 more are in the process of being handed over to customers, says Milliron.

Once the bastion of NASA and commercial satellite services, space has now become the final frontier for the do-it-yourselfer next door. Several companies are developing space products that range from orbiting payloads to lunar landers. The burgeoning private space industry has even spawned companies planning space hotels. And last month, SpaceX, a company founded by Tesla and PayPal’s Elon Musk, successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into orbit.

TubeSat is different because it lets and hobbyist engineers and astronomers build the satellite themselves. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite’s structural components, a printed circuit board, Gerber files (essentially blueprints), electronic components, solar cells, batteries, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer and some programming tools.

“It’s not as easy as building a little car model from a hobby shop, but it is doable with a soldering iron and a little practice,” says Antunes. “A single person in their basement can build this satellite.”

A fully built satellite must be returned to Interorbital Systems, which will launch it into space.

TubeSat could be used for applications such as biological experiments, testing of electronic components in space, or video imaging from space.

It doesn’t always have to be a scientific experiment. Antunes’ project, called ‘Project Calliope,’ will use magnetic, thermal and light sensors to detect information in the ionosphere and transmit the data back to earth in the form of sound. That sound is almost like space music, he says.

“Just like people have taken ambient sound and used it in music, artists can take this and create something out of it.” says Antunes.

Antunes, who got his personal satellite kit a few months ago, says he the equipment for Project Calliope is almost ready but he still has to put together the kit.

“I need a DIY person to make the boards, get the extra electronics, add the instruments and hook everything together,” he says. “The project management takes much longer than the technology.”

Once the TubeSat satellite is ready, Antunes hopes to start testing the equipment for his Project Calliope to ensure the electronics can withstand the rigors of space, including the shaking during launch.

“A lot of off-the-shelf electronics does well in space because you don’t have to worry about about water or weather,” says Antunes. “But it still has to be tested for vacuum, shielded from the sun and the cold.”

And after all, if the launch fails, Antunes isn’t worried. Interorbital Systems has promised him a free second attempt.

Photo: NASA’s ICESat/ NASA

Source:wired.com

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Got a netbook? Specifically, got a Samsung N130 or a Lenovo S10-2? Even more specifically, do you use it in and outdoors, but find it hard to read in the sun? We have good news! The Maker Shed will sell you one of Pixel Qi’s dual-mode displays as a straight swap-in for your existing LCD-panel.

The 10.1-inch screen runs in one of two modes. When indoors, or watching video, you use the regular LCD display, which will look pretty much the same as the one you already have. When you’re in to mood for some reading, or you are outside in bright sunlight, or you’re just running low on battery power, you can switch to the e-ink mode.

This disables the backlight and shows you hi-res, grayscale pixels, much like you’d see on the screen of the Amazon Kindle. Because it only uses power when updating the screen, it sips power.

There is also a hybrid mode, which lets the sun reflect off the back of the display assembly and back out through the color LCD. This both saves battery power and lets you view a normal color display outdoors.

The panel will cost you $275, which puts it out of the “merely curious” bracket but is still cheap enough for people who do a lot of outdoor computing. The Maker Shed store page also says that the panel will likely work in any netbook: the Lenovo and the Samsung are just the only ones so far tested and guaranteed.

And according to the Pixel Qi blog, which first described the plan to sell these panels separately from the company’s own notebooks, the swap-operation (swaperation?) is easy:

Its only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: its basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting [sic] the old screen and plugging this one in. Thats it. Its a 5 minute operation.

Available now.

Pixel Qi display [Maker Shed]

Source:wired.com

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With its weird reception troubles that seem to be triggered just by touching it, the iPhone 4 is like Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “It could get wrecked, stolen, scratched, breathed on wrong… a pigeon could shit on it! Who knows?”

The best solution so far seems to be Apple’s Bumper case, a $30 strip of rubber that wraps around the steel antenna band and stops your clammy hands from sucking out the signal. But it’s $30. Because of this, Oliver Nelson decided to make his own Bumper from one of those cheap rubber bracelets found pretty much everywhere, or by donating to a charity.

The case is as simple as it could be. Just find yourself a bracelet (look for one measuring “about 1.125-inches long and about 0.125-inches wide”) and stretch it around the outside of the phone. Oliver also made a few cut-outs so he could reach the headphone jack, the dock connector and the mute-button. Done, and you just saved yourself around $29.

In fact, Oliver saved himself the full $30: his bracelet came free, bundled, somewhat ironically, with an iPad charger. Still, even if you pay full-price, its likely that the money will be going to a good cause, and not into Apple’s pockets.

DIY: Ghetto iPhone 4 case from a 99c bracelet? [The iPhone Guru]

Source:wired.com

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