Forget about machines that can replicate themselves, what we want is a machine capable of making an 8 inch wide hollow torus out of sugar. The CandyFab project has been around for a while, but with the release of the new machine, the CandyFab 6000 they are reinventing the project. Built from the ground up to be a candy constructing beast, the CandyFab 6000 might be a little smaller than the previous version, but it’s much better designed. You can get more details on the new wiki site.
Like many pet owners, [Pete] was curious about his little furry friend’s habits while he was gone. He decided to build an RFID tracking system to monitor their positions. This data would then be available on the web. An Arduino handles the communication of the data, both to twitter and his personal cat tracking site. We were a bit surprised to see that the only data transmitted on the final project was whether the cat was inside or out. We’d like to see a heat map of the cat’s activity in the house.
[vimeo=4138521]
June 6th is the date of the upcoming Global Hackday. This time, focusing on cheap tangible interfaces, mainly trackmate. They want as many people to join as possible, even if you’re not comfortable with code. We’ve covered the construction of the trackmate surface before, now build one and get in there and contribute.
Canonical, the main sponsor Ubuntu Linux, is developing an Android execution environment to allow android apps on Linux desktops. There’s still a lot of work to do to get this running smooth, but they do have a proof of concept functioning, as seen above. This could be very nice for those who have linux netbooks.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n8LNxGbZbs]
[Scott] runs gamesbyemail.com. One of his biggest hurdles was producing real random numbers for the games. He had tried various methods like math.random and random.org, but kept getting complaints about the quality of the random numbers. His solution was to build an automatic dice roller. His initial attempts were made from Legos and were never quite reliable enough to be put into the system. The Dice-O-Matic however has proven to be a random number generating monster. It is 7 feet tall and capable of 1.3 million dice rolls per day. Wow.
[thanks Troy]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOTw_PkK_SU]
This is a nice little documentary on hacking. Made by [Jack Oats], this video sheds a little light on hacker culture. Filmed in Foulab during a workshop, there’s plenty to to see and enjoy. Show this to all your friends and relatives that get confused when you use the term hacking.
[via NYCResistor]
[John] sent us this nice little project. He shows us how to create a motion activated alarm that plays the Mario Brothers theme and flashes some lights. He’s using an ATTiny13a for the brains, and a cool mario mushroom candy tin for the body. You can see it in action after the break.
