Year: 2011

The Life Garden at Eyebeam

Beatriz da Costa’s anti-cancer work in progress, called “The Life Garden,” is currently on display at Eyebeam in Manhattan. The Life Garden is an anti-cancer medicinal and demonstration garden. Currently on display are our first attempts at growing various plants and herbs indoors that commonly need outdoor space in various different climate zones. Additional experiments […]

ColorHug: Open Source Display Colorimeter

ColorHug: Open Source Display Colorimeter

Because color can differ wildly from one monitor to another, many designers and publishers rely on proprietary colorimeters to calibrate their displays. Software developer and electrical engineer Richard Hughes has been working on his own open source colorimeter he calls ColorHug. Along with the Linux software (also open source), it takes about a minute for ColorHug to take several hundred measurements and create an ICC color profile, which can be read by other operating systems.

iPhone Acoustic Ruler

iPhone Acoustic Ruler

Here’s a novel way to take measurements using sound waves with an iPhone. German developer Florian Student’s Acoustic Ruler Pro for iOS will measure distances up to 25 meters by clocking the time delay of emitted sound waves. You can use the app with either a pair of headphones or with another iPhone to measure the distance between the two handsets.

Egg-Bot

The Egg-Bot is an art robot designed by Bruce Shapiro that’s fun to watch as it draws intricate designs on eggs or any other round objects 3cm–10cm in diameter, including ornaments, golf balls, and light bulbs. You design the patterns in the free app Inkscape, and the bot draws them using fine-point Sharpies, engraving tools, […]

The Dice Kit

This is a fantastic introductory electronics kit that comes with your choice of large red or green LEDs and everything else needed (aside from a soldering iron, solder, and flush cutters) to make one electronic 6-sided die. (The manufacturer says: “The name Dice Kit sounds a great deal better than ‘Die Kit’, so we bent […]