Apparently if you run AC and DC currents through a welding torch flame you can use the resulting plasma as a loudspeaker. [Thanks Cody]

Power metering

The Google Power Meter API is no longer in development but that didn’t stop [Pyrofer] from finishing his metering hardware. It uses a reflectance sensor to read the meter instead of using clamp-based current sensing.

Music videos from inside the instrument

Filming from inside of a guitar creates the camera effect seen above which looks like the waveform you’d see on an oscilloscope. [Thanks Philleb]

Hidden messages in audio files

GhostCoder lets you encrypt and hide audio files within other audio files. The thought is, you can piggyback your own data into Torrents that are circling the interwebs.

2×4 Chair

If you’re skilled with a Skill saw you can make a chair out of one 2 by 4. You can see the pattern you’ll have to cut out from the board in the image above, wow!

SketchChair is a piece of software that takes the engineer out of engineering furniture. In a child’s-dream-come-true you draw the outlines you’d like to have, add some legs, and the software pops out a design ready to be laser-cut. The finishing touch of adding palm fiber and felt produces what we imagine is a moderately comfortable place to sit. Now the hard part will be convincing your spouse that you should spend the money building an industrial grade laser cutter because of all the money you’ll save on furniture.

We’re still holding out for furniture that is 3d-printed from rock to match our Flintstone’s motif.

Oh, and as always, video after the break.

[via Buildlog]

A table and chair that can move around by themselves? What’s next, suicide booths, self-replicating robots, and Star Trek styled tablet computers? It seems that [Adam Lassy] is moving in that direction. He took this furniture from Ikea and made some neat modifications to give it mobility. Each of the four legs has wheels on them and the legs themselves rotate in unison to change the direction of travel. We could see the table as a more practical drink delivery system than the Bar2d2. It certainly would make for some great late-night pranks but the chair motors need to be silenced before that can happen.

[Thanks Balbor via Ikea Hacker]

Who hasn’t fantasized about riding on a hexapod robot?  With these detailed instructions, you very well could be living out your fantasy very soon. As you can see in the video, they opted for connected legs instead of 6 independent ones, so your dreams of riding the dancing Lou Bega bot may have to wait for another day.

[via Hack N Mod]

You may have already heard of the “take a seat” chair designed for libraries. Each chair has an RFID card reader inside. When the chair is activated, it follows the user holding the card around the library, providing an ever-present place to sit while searching through the stacks. When the user leaves, the chair returns to its docking station to power up and wait for the next patron.

Perhaps you’re saying, “I don’t want a chair that follows me, I want one that follows other people while I’m in it.” Say no more: we found not one, but two walking chairs. The first legged chair, dubbed the WL-16, was designed jointly by a team at Tokyo’s Waseda University and a Japanese robotics company called Tmsuk. It uses two legs composed of several rams and a plate that acts as a foot. It is capable of maintaining its balance under the shifting weight of a rider and walking up a flight of stairs with a relatively gradual grade. It is radio controlled, but the joint team is working on installing a joystick controller on the chair.

The second walking chair we found, the Hubo FX-1, appears far more substantial: it also has legs, but they look a lot more like human legs with their knee and ankle joints. It also stands at an impressive 2 meters high, and is capable of lifting as much as 220 pounds. It is controlled with a joystick by the rider, but relies on various built-in sensors to maintain its balance and an awareness of the local terrain. Its designers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have not yet been able to build one with internal power, but they are attempting to fix that in the next model.

If those chairs are too functional and not artistic enough for your taste, check out this self-assembling chair by students at Cornell University. The chair is able to collapse into many pieces, then the pieces move toward each other, reassemble, and stand up as fully functional chair once more. It serves no practical purpose, but the concept of self assembling parts is intriguing. If you know of any other chairs that do neat tricks, let us know.