Year: 2008

The GO Sequencer

December 4, 2008 by 8 Comments

go_seq

[Guy John] sent in this cool sequencer project. He’s using the game Go as the input. A web camera pics up the location of the pieces on the grid and plots them in his sequencing software. You can see that it is still very much in progress, but it is coming along nicely. He openly admits that it may never be completely practical. There is still so much to be improved to get it even comfortably usable, such as motion detection to remove his hand from the mix when re locating the Go pieces. This project is very similar to the Skittles interface that we posted back in July.  It would be kind of interesting, though probably repetitive, to actually play a game of go and listen to the variations in the music while you play.

Winboni, A Window Cleaning Robot

December 4, 2008 by 27 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kchwH-3tY0]

The Winboni is the first place winner in the International Student Design Competition of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Winboni is a small robot that cleans windows. That alone doesn’t set the robot apart. The fact that it is held on by suction is what distinguishes it. Running off AA batteries, this robot clings to the window as it cleans it with felt pads. It is hard to believe that this isn’t already a commercial product. Actually, we thought we had even seen it before, but we can’t find it now.

[via DVICE]

Xbox 360 Portable

December 3, 2008 by 50 Comments

ben_heck

A couple months ago we posted [Ben Heck]’s in-progress photos of his Xbox 360 laptop (with links to his other versions). He’s just put the finishing touches on it, and dubbed it the Xbox 360 Portable. It has a removable hard drive on top and memory slots on the side. The webcam is embedded in the frame and there’s internal WiFi. With chatpads available now, he’s decided not to include a keyboard. It’s really a nice machine. Check out the video below for a tour of the system.

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Python 3000 Officially Released

December 3, 2008 by 13 Comments

python3k

Python 3000 has officially been released. The final bug, Issue2306, “Update What’s new in 3.0” has been closed. Python 3000, py3k, Python 3.0, is a major release for the community. [Jeremy Hylton] pegs the earliest mention of the beast to January 2000. The new release has grown from PEP 3000, opened April 2006.

Py3k breaks backwards compatibility with previous releases in order to reduce feature duplication and promote one obvious way of getting things done. The first major change is that print is now a builtin function and not a statement. int and long have been unified, and integer division now returns a float. Py3k uses concepts of “text” and “data” instead of “Unicode strings” and “8-bit strings”. You can read about many of the changes in What’s New In Python 3.0. Some new features have been backported to Python 2.6 so you can start implementing them in your current code to ease the transition. 2.6 also has the -3 command line switch to warn you about features that are being removed or changed. Finally, the tool 2to3 is a source-to-source translator that should automate a lot of the changes.

Documentation for the new release is online. Source packages and binaries are available now.

[via johl]

Inside Nokia’s Hardware Damage Labs

December 3, 2008 by 11 Comments

[vimeo 2310654]

Like everybody, we sometimes get a little frustrated with our cellphones. Probably one of the most annoying things is when we drop our phones once and they stop working. At Nokia’s hardware damage labs in San Diego, they physically test their phones for extreme uses. They test things like flip tension, water resistance, and even UV resistance. Recently, the folks over at MobileCrunch were given a tour of these labs and were nice enough to post an in-depth article about what they saw. In addition to the impact testing video above, there are many more videos posted that demonstrate the tests they perform.

Intro To Charlieplexing

December 3, 2008 by 4 Comments

charlie

[sixerdoodle] sent us this nice firefly project that serves as an intro to charlieplexing. We’ve mentioned charlieplexing before, in our LED Life post and the Breath Controlled LED candles post. This project is quite simple and focues mainly on how to make a charlieplexed circuit work.

The goal was to create a tiny firefly bottle with SMD LEDs and as few wires as possible. In the video, after the break, it is hard to tell just how small this thing is until we see the battery. There are clear directions and fantastic pictures detailing exactly how to set up a charlieplexed circuit with 6 LEDs.

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