Look at this awesome glove. This awesome glove is used to control tetris. Yes, you read that right, it controls tetris. This was a final project at Cornell in the summer of 2008. They built this glove to do gesture controlled tetris. With all the announcements of the PS3 motion device and Microsoft’s project Natal, it’s nice to look back to our very recent past and see some alternative user input. These people are using accellerometer data only, sent to the computer wirelessly.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has released the 2313 target board. A business card sized development board for working with ATTiny 2313 microprocessors. We saw them at the Maker Faire, and thought they looked familiar. You may recognize them due to their similarity to the Atmegaxx8 family board. As usual, this is released as creative commons and source files are available on their site.
[Vik] sent in this simple little project. He purchased a $3 spy ear, a simple 3 transistor amplifier, and attached a stethoscope end. Little modification was necessary, mainly just scraping a bit more space in the microphone tube. The end result is a super cheap electronic stethascope that can be hooked to a computer or other speakers for multiple people to listen to.
These nifty looking goggles are actually an instrument. The guts of a pikachu doll have been splayed and mounted to the goggles. The controller is an external box that allows you to make all kinds of changes to the pitch and sample section. You can see a video of it after the break. We don’t really find this to be great music, but find watching the guy fairly amusing.
[Matt] wrote in to tell us about this project. He plans on travelling with his MSI Wind and wanted better audio recording capabilities. He decided to install an additional microphone and a preamp. He made a custom preamp and wired it directly to the motherboard. The microphone was then mounted in the laptop screen. The second microphone is placed opposite of the first, about 18cm apart which [Matt] claims gives it a binaural effect. We think that this might just classify as stereo though. Wouldn’t you have to seperate them with a barrier or dampening device for binaural? It doesn’t really matter though, stereo mics are a great addition to the MSI Wind, and he did it very well. He does point out that it picks up a lot of noise though. There’s always room for improvement.
After hearing that his video card might be repairable by heating it up to reflow it, this user did just that. He stripped it down and tossed it in his oven. It’s amazing how often this type of hackish repair works. We’ve heard of people using candles on ibooks, tossing video cards in oven,s and wrapping an xbox 360 in a towel and running it for 30 minutes to get it hot enough to reflow itself. Why even bother with controlled temperatures and exact measurements? What other crazy fixes have you had to employ? We had a Playstation that only worked upside down.
[via engadget]
This digital thermometer won’t win any awards for being something innovative and new, but we really like how it looks. The bar graph style display adds something to the project that a normal character display just wouldn’t. You can download source code and schematics on the site.
[via YourITronics]
