Here’s a flickr photo set of an instruction manual in english of how to make your own “Doo Rag” – these are modified electronic toys that can be used as musical instruments. Not only do they sound really neat, they look great – here’s a photo set of modded toys. In MAKE volume 04 we also showed how to do this if you another step-by-step. Thanks Ed!
On Slashdot I saw that ThinkComputers.org has an overview of some of the new gadgets at CES (yearly consumer electronics show in Las Vegas) and their round up includes a laptop with an display on the outside of the case…. “ASUS had a really cool concept that is not in production yet, but may be in a year or so. It is a laptop outfitted with an Auxiliary display, or external display. This display is used for quick date book and note checking to save the end user the time. ASUS is working directly with Microsoft on this technology and Vista will be outfitted it support this type of technology.” images here and here. Awhile back we made our own DIY version since it seems it’s going to take a bit longer until you can actually buy these, the how to is here.
Remember the cool Bluetooth enabled POV project (spells words in the air with light) that Mikey Sklar made? Well, he was kind enough to let us put an excellent 3 minute video in our iTunes video podcast feed. So if you’d like to see how it was made, just click here to subscribe to our iTunes feed and you’ll automatically get the video along with all the other great audio and video from MAKE (the video will play on PCs, Macs and video iPods). Link to M4V (17MB).
Batman writes “Last Aptil, MIT created their very own Disco Dance Floor. Over the summer, they released their code and sold their PCB boards online, and here are some examples of what people have done with it: WashU’s Disco Dance Floor, Clint’s Disco Dance Floor, Tom’s Disco Dance Floor (in German), and David’s Disco Bar!” Link.
Video of a wireless MIDI glove…“haduz is a 24 year-old computer engineering graduate and musician from Bologna, Italy. He’s developed the 3DID wireless MIDI glove, with 5 bend sensors (I’m guessing that’s fingers), 3 gyroscopes, 3 accelerometers and 18 hours of battery life. As he says: “The most exciting thing is that the cost of the actual prototype (the glove shown in the video) together with the wireless receiver is about 150 euros.” Thanks Tom! Link.
Hunter is looking for some ideas for the discarded game gear he found, post up in the comments! – “My friend and I had an unusually lucky day and we got a lot of free electronics. Some of them working and some not. Here’s what we got: N64 – working, original playstation – working PS2 – works sometimes, Gameboy pocket – not working, gamecube – almost new condition and working and working we already have all of these so we were wondering if you would have any suggestions on how we could mod them or what we could make them into. it doesnt necessarily have to be all of them together. we were thinking about making the PS2 sphere but the PS2 doesnt work all the time and there isnt a step by step instruction on how to make the PS2 sphere.”
John writes “Heres’ a great resource on LED products, but more importantly some of the best information on using LEDs in your own projects. Most useful are the LED calculator and the LED series/parallel array wizard for calculating resistor values for your LED applications. It even gives you the appropriate resistor color code. Talk about service!” Link.
