Relays can do cool stuff when you hook them up to the Internet. Check out XDA member JsChiSurf demonstrate his Android controlled garage door opener. Using an old Linux box connected to a serial relay, he’s able to toggle his garage door opener using a custom app from his Android handset.
Conceived as a simple way to record both sides of a conversation in a single shot for a documentary about love filmed in Paris, The Love Box has a name more likely to elicit a stare rather than a split screen. It achieves its effect using a single mirror mounted on a slide and rotated 16º from the camera.
Reportedly, fully 20 percent—some 200 million—of the world’s mobile devices incorporate a clear cover made of Corning’s Gorilla Glass brand toughened aluminosilicate glass. Depending on the particular test used to make the determination, Gorilla Glass is seven or eight times stronger than the common soda-lime glasses used, for instance, in most windowpanes.
It’s not quite as dramatic as Minority Report, but this ad hoc presentation by Kinect hacker DDRBoxman of Recursive Penguin seems to have recreated something strikingly similar to the gestural interface from the 2002 blockbuster running on a Galaxy Nexus handset.
Use the camera in your Android smartphone to detect radiation with the Radioactivity Counter app from Rolf-Dieter Klein. Just place a small piece of black tape over the camera lens, calibrate for ambient noise, and you’ll be ready to take readings in no time. The app uses the device’s built-in CMOS sensor to detect primary […]
It’s hard not to get excited when you see assistive technology like the sign language interpreting Show and Tell Glove from Tel Aviv area makers Oleg Imanilov, Zvika Markfield, and Tomer Daniel. The glove uses a LillyPad Arduino to sample flex sensors, an accelerometer, and gyro into an ADK board that then talks to an Android app that translates sign language and gestures into written text. To improve performance, a neural network is fed gestures manually to compensate for varying hand sizes directly on the handset. They’re still working out the bugs, but the current results are more than encouraging.
Don’t you just hate it when your smartphone runs out of juice? If you’re like me, you’re probably not far from an open USB port, so you’re set if you’re the type that always carries around a spare cord. But that rarely happens, right? Not if makers Lucky, Nate, and Mark have anything to do about it. Their Cord-On-Board case for the iPhone 4 takes care of the need to always carry around a cord because it keeps one handy inside its durable PVC shell.
