Enhance iPhone Macro Shots with 8x Lens
The current iPhone takes a pretty decent macro shot to begin with. If you’re looking to go beyond what you get out-of-box, take a look at the 8x macro lens from Westchester, IL area Etsy user Chris Ferguson.
Imaging
Octopus Soft-Robot Tentacle, Suckers!
Everyone loves a soft robot, and I’m fond of the marine variety. This bioinspired prototype tentacle, made of silicone rubber, not only curls and extends in eerily squidlike fashion, it’s also got pressure sensors embedded beneath its suckers so it can grasp objects, like a cephalopod should.
Flying Bots Spot Paradrop Targets With Hacked AR Code
The clever designers at Chicago’s Tanagram adapted code developed to recognize those little black-and-white augmented-reality markers (“fiduciary markers”) for target acquisition on a DARPA-funded robot that can autonomously deliver humanitarian aid and other supplies to 20′ square markers unrolled on the ground. What’s great about fiducial marker tracking technology is that it is pre-built to […]
DIY Tilt-Shift Lens
If you’re looking for an interesting project for your DSLR camera, you might find the DIY Tilt-Shift lens from Flickr user Maciej Pietuszynski to be worthy of your weekend project time. Maciej’s version uses a shower head and rubber glove in addition to a 50mm/1.8 prime lens. If you’re comfortable cutting a pipe with a hacksaw and disassembling a perfectly good lens, you can pull off this build. The images a lens like this produces more than makes up for the time it takes to assemble.
Kinect Haptic Belt Helps the Blind to Navigate Obstacles
The viSparsh belt developed by Young India Fellows Rolly Seth, Jatin Sharma and Tushar Chugh in New Delhi with guidance by Rahul Mangharam of the University of Pennsylvania, is a computer vision assisted haptic feedback system that uses a Microsoft Kinect to detect objects near the wearer and notifies them through an array of vibration motors across the belt
Super Slow Motion Canon DSLR Shutter Action
Destin of Smarter Every Day took the lens off his Canon 60D, pointed a Phantom Flex high speed video camera at the shutter, and took a picture. The exposure cycle happens in four stages and lasts less than a tenth of a second in real time, but the Phantom Flex stretches that action out to […]
First Pictures From the Pegboard Phased Array Radar
Yesterday I mentioned MIT’s soon-to-be-released open-courseware materials detailing a DIY phrased radar array radar system built from pegboard and wi-fi antennae. The project, from MIT engineers Drs. Bradley Perry, Jonathan Paul Kitchens, Patrick Bell, Jeffrey Herd, and Greg Charvat produces ‘radar video’ at about three frames per second. Greg just e-mailed me a link to […]
