DIY speaker enclosures are a great way to add a little personal style into your decor. Daniel McLeod’s Recycled Atari 2600 Portable Media Audio Dock has to be one of the cooler enclosures I’ve run across lately. Replacing the internals with speakers and including a 30-pin iPhone connector on the cartridge, this custom speaker is […]
Waiting out an unfortunately lengthy shipment, Stockholm area maker Johan von Konow decided to build for his son a working set of augmented reality game pieces for the Cars 2 AppMATes game on his iPad. To achieve a faithful representation of the characters in the game, Johan modified a couple of PEZ dispenser tops approximately […]
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 […]
Zigurd Mednieks checks in from CES In trying to find interesting products for makers, I came across some machine screws that are smaller than fleas, 0.2mm across the shaft. The Matsumoto Industries product was exhibited using a microscope. If you are making something very small, that’s your screw. They were too small for me to […]
Since CES is such a big show, some companies do outrageous things to get noticed. Whether it’s building a $30k iPod dock or hiring stuntmen to ride around town on top of cars, the idea is to stick out. The thing is, there’s a fine line between causing a little buzz and accidental product development. […]
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.
Master modder Ben Heck is at it again. This time around he’s created a hand-held game controller for the iPhone using the guts from an Ion iCade iPad game controller and some laser-cut parts. As ever, Ben pulls off a slick portable mod suitable for the store shelves.
