GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Sure, you can make a ping-pong ball float just by blowing at it through a drinking-straw, but wouldn’t a ball-levitating robot be so much more fun? Luckily for us, University of Illinois grad students Aaron Becker and Robert Sandheinrich answered “yes” to this question, and built this incredible machine:

It’s called the Robo-Air Blower, and while the principle is pretty simple, the physics behind it are complex. A gimbaled nozzle fires compressed air at 620 kPa of pressure. This jet creates a fast-moving, low pressure area around the ball, trapping it. The jet is powerful enough to lift balls of between 24mm and 194mm in diameter, and up to 188-grams of mass.

But the tricky part is control. Fluid dynamics are a chaotic thing, and the programming of the robot control multiple balls, as well as non-spherical objects, like the water-bottle in the video, is complex. The robot’s brain is fed by two stereo cameras which track the balls’ movements and adjust the jet based on an algorithm.

Despite this somewhat dry explanation, the results are spectacular. The robot can push the balls sideways and diagonally, and make them jump through hoops. It looks like some kind of iPhone or Android video-game brought to life, or an up-to-date version of the old loop-and-live-wire game we played in school.

Robo-Air Blower Makes Ping-Pong Balls, Apples Defy Gravity [Automaton / IEEE Spectrum]

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Source:wired.com

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This is a call to arms, a plea for all you lovely Gadget Lab readers to do your sacred nerd-duty. Head over to the Tokyo Flash blog right now and vote for this amazing Tron-inspired watch. Did I just say “Tron” and “watch” in the same sentence? Yes I did. Off you go now, but hurry back.

The watch is called 7R0N, neatly sidestepping trademark troubles whilst clearly signaling its inspiration. Designed by Scott Galloway over in Yorkshire, England, it has bioluminescent strips which represent the trails of the Lightcycles in the movie, and the hour and minute “hands” are replaced by the frisbee-like light-discs the battling computer-dwellers hurl at each other when enacting their deadly video-games.

Scott says “I tried to think of a way to get the watch noticed. I have several light up LED watches, but as cool as they are, its always been about the clock face with little attention to the strap itself. I wanted a watch where the strap was just as important as the face itself.”

Your watch, Scott, is awesome, and we want to send everybody we can over to the Tokyo Flash site to vote and hopefully get this thing made. There’s just one problem: it’s actually pretty easy to tell the time on this thing, in contrast to pretty much any watch made by Tokyo Flash. The outer ring shows minutes, and the inner ring indicates hours. Thus you can quickly and easily decipher the times in the picture above: Eight O’Clock, four O’Clock and four O’Clock. Simple.

Seriously, people, go vote on this thing. Even if you don’t want it, we need some for office Christmas gifts. Obviously, fop-haired Daniel Dumas will be needing one to keep his Tokyo Flash collection complete, but even the normally punctuality-challenged Gadget Lab slavedriver Dylan Tweney wants one of of these. And what Dylan wants, Dylan gets.

Tron-inspired LED Watch [Tokyo Flash. Thanks, Scott!]

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Source:wired.com

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Oh man, the iFixit crew just hopped up another step on the Stairway to Awesome. They have opened up and explored a Magnavox Odyssey 100, successor to the world’s first home games-console.

Kyle Wiens and his nerdy team are better known for flying around the globe to buy brand-new Apple products in order to tear them apart, photographing and detailing the internals for our voyeuristic techno-pleasure. The Magnavox teardown marks a week of more retro autopsies, and reveals surprising circuit designs and even some analog controls inside the 1975 console.

The case is held together with a single flathead screw, easily removed, Once inside you see not only a circuit-board but also a mess of wires and components. This, according to the know-alls at iFixit, was because Magnavox wanted to ship the console fast, and wasn’t sure that Texas Instruments would have the chips ready on time. There are also pots (potentiometers) which can be twisted by the user to adjust the positions of the on-screen goals and walls of the two built-in games, tennis and hockey.

We’re looking forward to seeing what other historical devices iFixit will be ripping open this week in celebration of its new line of game console repair manuals. I have my fingers crossed for a Vectrex, if only to see just how they managed to cram such a big wad of amazing inside.

Magnavox Odyssey 100 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews