Plants as speakers

You can make pretty much anything a speaker by vibrating it. Japanese engineer, [Keiji Koga], has been working for many years to perfect his plant based sound transmission system. The voice coil is at the bottom of the plant container and transfers sound up the stalk to the leaves. It’s and interesting idea, but we can’t imagine it sounds … Read the rest

Anti-paparazzi sunglasses

UPDATE: Video can also be found here.

Ah, the life of the work-a-day hacker: sure, it’s glamorous, but all the paparazzi dogging your every step can get unbearably stressful. Thankfully, you have a recourse with these anti-paparazzi sunglasses. They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. The wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, … Read the rest

Logic probe kit


Logic probes can be anything from useful to critical depending on the project, but if you don’t have one already, why not try building one? Instructables has a guide to building a logic probe using a PCB, an assorted lot of resistors, capacitors, regulators, DIP sockets, a 9V battery clip (and 9V battery), and a hex inverter. Instead of using … Read the rest

AirPiano: touch free IR piano


We were excited to learn of [Omer Yosha]‘s AirPiano, but being the persnickety nerds we are, we think its more like a theremin than a piano. The device lets users play 24 different notes with a wave of the hand over the AirPiano. The “keys” are arranged in a matrix of three tiers with eight notes per tier; if … Read the rest

Eye-Fi Explore review

The WiFi uploading Eye-Fi SD card made a big splash when it was first introduced, but now Eye-Fi has a whole line of different products. The top of the line is the Eye-Fi Explore, which supports geotagging without using a GPS. Instead of GPS hardware, it uses the Skyhook Wireless Wi-Fi Postitioning System, which correlates the position of the … Read the rest

Turn your old hard drive into a sander/grinder


[Jipa] over at MetkuMods put up an original re-use for old hard drives: make em into power tools. The tiny servo motor that drives the spindle doesn’t generate much torque, but once the drive is spinning fast enough, the inertial force of the platter is enough to make it usable for small grinding/sanding projects. The platters are re-stacked directly on … Read the rest

DuinoStamp


We think that in honor of the DuinoStamp’s small size and big power, the post about it should also be small and powerful. About the size of 34-pin DIP, the DuinoStamp is a breakout board that fits in DIP sockets and is Arduino compatible. It features an ATmega 168-20PU chip, a 16MHz resonator, decoupling capacitors and more. It doesn’t … Read the rest