[Peter Kirn] from Create Digital Music has an article up highlighting many of the great music and visual performance pieces planned for The Last HOPE on Friday night. If you are around New York and not accustomed to hacking conferences, this could be a great excuse to go check it out. Here are some of our favorite projects.
Following today’s earlier post on data gloves, HandUSB is a glove interface designed to relay fingertip touch data to a computer via USB. Although the gloves themselves are not extremely interesting or useful for your average hacker, the project has some good documentation. The electronics are all open source and he has links to the EAGLE files and the AVR Libc code. You can also find a demo program written for DOS. This project uses AVR-USB by Objective Development so if you are looking to move on from your USB-serial chips, this project would be a good resource to study.
[via YourlTronics]
Speaking of laser engraving, the blackbag blog announced that Toool has designed 2 unique picksets for The Last HOPE this year. First is the credit card sized snap-off set seen above. They have named this one The Last HOPE emergency pickset. The other pickset is a new version of the ‘double sided pick’ series. This set consists of picks with the same tool on either end, but they are sized differently. This set will contain 8 picks with promised improvements. If you are interested in more complex picks, check out the centipede.
The new Epilog Zing is designed to bring laser engraving to the home for personal use. It’s got 25 watts of power, a small enough footprint to fit neatly on your desk, and the video above shows it has a pretty high resolution. But compared to the mini18, the Zing has less Z movement, a lower wattage, a smaller engraving area, and about half the speed. Also, with a price set around $8,000, we don’t think many people will be buying them for personal use just yet. However, if you have a small home business that requires these services, the Zing could be perfect. If you are looking for more information on laser engraving, see [ladyada’s] laser information page.
[via Engadget]
Instructables user [ManaEnergyPotion] has posted a rather humorous Bluetooth handset hack. He simply took apart an airsoft handgun and a Bluetooth headset, and then placed the components neatly within the case. The earpeice is actually in the barrel of the gun, while the microphone is in the handle. You pull the trigger to answer a call, or to end a call. The best part is that they took this to the iPhone product launch, and posted a video of people’s reaction to this as an actual product concept. You can check it out after the break.
[Christopher Mitchell] (previously on Hack a Day) has come up with a rather interesting input device. The Clove 2 glove is a Bluetooth data input interface. The goal is to be able to “type” without the use of a traditional keyboard. Key strokes are achieved through finger movements. Your computer simply sees this as a Bluetooth HID device and some software translates it for you.
While it may seem confusing, he’s designed it to be very similar to typing on a keyboard. Each finger movement or combination is a key stroke. Just like typing on a regular keyboard, there are modifying strokes such as ALT or shift that effect others. Most common used keys require the least combinations of finger movements.
