Hackaday Links: September 28, 2011

Disposable coffee maker

[Sepehr] didn’t have a coffee maker, and the local coffee shops were all out of joe. He got his fix by making a drip coffee maker out of disposable cups and knives.

Flexible braille display

Thin film technology is being developed to help the visually impaired. This flexible OLED display has embedded muscle cells which create a braille display. [Thanks Aaron]

Printable iPhone tripod mount

Looking to make those iPhone videos a little more stable, and the pictures a little less blurry? Try out this printable tripod mount that [Chris] came up with.

Arduino macro photos

Speaking of photographs, [Daniel] wrote in to share some macro pictures he took of an Arduino. They’re sure to be of interest to those readers who love everything Arduino.

Carpeting a mouse

Add a unique texture to your mouse by covering part of the body with fabric. The lower half of the mouse case above is covered in a carpet-like material [translated]. [Thanks Clicker]

17 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: September 28, 2011

  1. Had the idea of using piezo electric to do braille a few years ago. Had no clue about uCs and decided a simple translator would be a good start. Got as far as learning grade one braille but the contractions in grade 2 scared me a little.

    Would love one of these to play with my project. (and refres my braille)

  2. Coffee maker – Okay
    Flexible braille display – Cool, useful
    iPhone mount – cool, useful
    arduino macro shots – I’m a big arduino fan but I can get pics on flickr, thanks
    carpeting mouse – worst idea ever? Mice already get dirty and sweaty. Now you want to put a sweat absorbing material on it? fail.

  3. For awhile, I participated in a project which aimed to make an electronic “braille” system for blind people – a single character which would change dot heights without having to move your fingers.

    One problem with any system will be the speed of rendering. Blind people pass their hands across a line of braille really fast in terms of characters-per-minute.

    The only thing I could think of which *might* have been fast enough to render the braille was an impact printer head. It’s straightforward to make something that will raise/lower dots in a braille pattern, but very difficult to make it fast enough to be usable.

    If anyone can solve the speed problem, I think a “single char” braille reader would be a big success. Blind people wouldn’t need a wide display area for reading.

  4. iPhone tripod mount – would be a good idea if they didn’t stick a horrible rolling shutter camera in the phone. On that note oes any phone manufacturer use a camera which DOESN’T have a rolling shutter? that kind of footage looks bad whenever the camera moves, and the increasing proliferation of rolling shutter video footage appearing on normal tv shows (and film) is not nioe to watch whenever the camera panning fast or watching traffic go by etc.
    Global shutter, folks, don’t settle for less.

    Macro shots of circuitboards – just what HaD needs, more Arduino porn…

    The braille film has some real potential though – the possibility of dynamically controlled, physical buttons on touchscreens is perhaps the next biggest thing to happen to computer/gadget displays.

    1. I had forgotten about wanting a Return key on a mouse entirely… The version of Firefox I have now, now has a “Paste & Go” entry in the context menu of the URL bar, so no more need to paste a URL and hit Return anymore.

      If you still want/need Return on your mouse, you could get a mouse with a nav button there and remap it in software.

  5. I like the mouse carpet idea, something for me to consider once the sides of my IntelliMouse loose much more of their rubber coating. You could always take the fabric off the mouse and wash it if it becomes too funky.

  6. Hmm funny…

    here in Japan disposable coffee makers are a wide used commercial product.
    Interesting how regional difference make us to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

    Random link:

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