Developed by the research department of Japan’s Ministry of Defense, the Spherical Flying Machine is a first of its kind remote control vehicle that can perform a vertical take off and landing and has the ability to use its surface for locomotion.
One of the projects featured at the Mini Maker Faire was Ytai Ben-Tsvi’s IOIO, an Android hardware accessory kit that predated the Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK), and is a bit simpler to use: there’s no need to do any programming on the microcontroller, you can load firmware updates from the Android phone, and the Android programming side is pretty darn easy, too. On top of that, the IOIO supports a lot more phones than the ADK does: while the ADK requires Android 2.3.4 or greater, the IOIO will talk to a phone as old as the G1!
Happy Halloween, makers! Our featured image from the MAKE Flickr pool this week is a fantastic off-hand iPhone shot from inside a Jack-o’-lantern, by regular contributor lookseeseen. And if that’s not sufficiently high-concept pumpkin photography for your refined tastes…
In an excellent homage to Ghostbusters II, Eric used Processing and a Kinect to create a Vigo portrait with eyes that follow you as you pass by. With a little Photoshop help from his coworkers, Eric created this interactive display in just one day for his company’s Halloween-themed open house. It looks like a lot […]
Back in June, I was excited about the idea of so-called “light field” photography – a digital raster process that captures not only intensity and color for each pixel, but also the direction of inbound light. The upshot? So-called “light field” cameras actually record a vector field for each image that allows ray-tracing routines in software to produce images of the scene arbitrarily focused at any depth, including infinite.
In celebration of the Wearable Light Organ (above), our 10th electronics project in the Weekend Projects series, we’re doing another giveaway. This time, you could win a Maker’s Notebook AND a Maker Shed Mintronics: Survival Pack which is packed with some of the very components we’ve been using in many of our projects.
I set out to write a generic “props” round-up, but quickly discovered that our props tag is pretty deep, and covers a wide range of subjects including haunt props and/or prop furniture, elaborate costumes, and display props. I narrowed my focus, then, to props a person might carry around as part of a costume, and found, even then, there was more cool stuff than I could fit into one roundup.
