GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Spurred on by cash prizes, cool applications and the glory of getting code to work, Xbox Kinect hackers have opened up the camera and have it running on full throttle. Here’s a short list of what’s been done in just one week.

• Hector Martin was the first to post open-source drivers to Github and a proof-of-concept video, winning $3000 for himself and $2000 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of Adafruit’s Open Kinect contest.
• Google software engineer Matt Cutts sponsored another $2000 contest for people who used the newly-found open-source drivers to run a cool application. Because apparently, numeric depth sensor output isn’t very cool. Cutts proposed some potential projects, the first being “A Minority Report-style user interface where you can open, move, and close windows with your movements.”
• Within a day, a user with the handle Flomuc adapted Hector’s code to use multitouch-style pinch-and-spread gestures to manipulate photos with Kinect running on Ubuntu Linux.
• Meanwhile Theo Watson was likewise able to port the now rapidly-developing open-source drivers to run Kinect on Mac OS X.

Pretty cool, if you’re into this sort of thing. Me, I’m holding out for someone to beat Matt Cutts’s second challenge to hackers:

What if you move the Kinect around or mount it to something that moves? The Kinect has an accelerometer plus depth sensing plus video. That might be enough to reconstruct the position and pose of the Kinect as you move it around. As a side benefit, you might end up reconstructing a 3D model of your surroundings as a byproduct.

To paraphrase The Social Network, Kinect on a MacBook just isn’t that cool. You know what’s cool?

Kinect on a robot. Controlled by a junior high student. That’s what this is about.

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

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

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Gardening is about getting your hands dirty and back in touch with nature. But if you are a geek like Andrew Frueh, a graphic designer who lives in Philadelphia, the hobby can take on a high-tech twist.

For less than $200, Frueh has created a garden automation system called GardenBot that uses open source hardware (such as the Arduino) to monitor humidity, temperature and soil conditions. The data is then poured into charts so you can view the world as the plants see it, he says.

“It’s not terribly complicated,” says Frueh, who has put the system into his 120-square-foot backyard garden that has about 20 tomato plants, collard greens, kale and peppers. “The biggest hurdles would be understanding Arduino and having some soldering experience.”

High-tech farming using soil sensors and intelligent management of water resources has been growing among professional farmers. For home gardeners, there are products such as the $50 EasyBloom Plant Sensor that will measure sunlight, temperature, water drainage and fertilizer. But some of those features require subscription, and users can’t hack or tweak it.

Chart shows the conditions in Andrew Freuh's garden over three days.

The GardenBot’s brain is the Arduino board. The rest of the system has a garden station, which is a junction box for all the sensors and a place to secure the wiring.

The key modules for the system are soil moisture sensor, soil temperature sensor, light level and water value. Each of these modules can be built separately and integrated into GardenBot.

Once GardenBot is live, it can send data to a computer so that the information is plotted on a chart and updated every 15 minutes.

Frueh decided to use open source hardware because he was excited by the Arduino microcontroller and the potential to build a system that would be based on modules.

GardenBot has made his gardening experience better and easier, says Frueh.

“We ended up using much less water this year, which was nice,” he says. “It changed how I was thinking about watering the plants.”

Frueh’s GardenBot has been running for about two months with no downtime.

If you would like to build the GardenBot yourself, check out Freuh’s well illustrated and step-by-step instructions on his website.

Photos: Andrew Frueh

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews