Twittjr

May 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

Got an IBM PCjr laying around? Why not turn it into a twitter browsing machine? [Alex Grant] did this for the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Creativity and Innovation festival. You can enter search terms into the Twittjr and it will display the top 3 results from twitter. Leave it alone for a minute and it will refresh on its own. To make this happen, the Twittjr is connecting to another computer that is utilizing the twitter API to make the searches. The results are then pushed back to the Twittjr for display. All of this is done via the original modem. While [Alex] takes a moment to explain what twitter is, we feel it might be better to explain what a modem is. You see, back when the PCjr was new, we really did communicate via an analog signal over the phone lines at roughly 300 baud.

[thanks Chris]

WikiBrowser

May 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 33 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1TelXmRQs0]

This project is particularly amusing. It doesn’t have a whole lot of practical use, but it makes up for it in style. They have an SD card with Wikipedia from 2003 downloaded to it. This is accessed with a Parallax propeller microcontroller based system and displayed on a small retro looking screen. We like it. We don’t think we would ever actually use it, but we would definitely keep it around.

Electrostatic Computer Interface

April 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

[vimeo=4366452]
[Justin] sent in his 1st place winning project from Northeastern’s Electrical Engineering Senior Design Capstone. It’s an interface that uses electrostatics to detect your hand position above it. As you can see in the video, it has decent resolution and can detect position on all 3 axes. When they uncover it, you can see the sensors arranged in a grid. They point out that each sensor isn’t just like a button, but rather detects a range of motion. They are using a pic 18×4550 to handle the sensors, which then communicates to the PC via USB. This could be pretty useful for musical performances as well as an alternative interface for people who can’t use a mouse.EO

Augmented Network Interfaces

April 25, 2009 by Eliot 35 Comments

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Here’s an interesting bit of research to come out of Microsoft and UCSD. The Somniloquy project is a new type of network interface. It’s a USB device that allows a computer to continue network communications after being put to sleep. By offloading these tasks, machines that would normally stay awake for RDP and file transfers are only powered up when absolutely necessary. The device uses a Gumstix board like the one used in the Tor hardware adapter. The device pictured above has two USB interfaces, but the second is just for debugging and not needed for proper operation. The board runs BSD and creates a USBNet bridge to the Vista host. When the host daemon detects the computer going to sleep, it hands off active communication to the gumstix. They developed “stub” applications to handle the various types of communication. For downloads, they used wget to download only the portion of the data that was still left. For bittorrent, they customized the command line client ctorrent to manage the download. Both programs wake up the PC upon completion and transfer the file off of the SD card.

[via Engadget]

Controlling Spykee Via Web Cam Using Your Fingers

April 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

spykee

[epokh] sent in this cool project where he wrote some custom code to control the Spykee robot using gestures. He filters out everything but green through his web cam, then wraps his fingers in green tape. He then runs a series of filters to clean it up a little bit. The resulting “blobs” are tracked and converted to motor commands. You can see the setup in action in the video after the break. This guy might look familiar, as we posted a super quick head tracking rig he did with legos recently. Some of you mentioned, in the comments, that the legos were a waste, you’ll find that he thought so too, and ended up fabbing a simple rig to take the place of the legos.

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Dell Adamo Teardown

April 10, 2009 by Eliot 4 Comments

dell_adamo

TechRepublic and iFixit partnered to teardown Dell’s flagship notebook, the Adamo. The Adamo is positioned to compete directly with Apple’s MacBook Air. The Dell crams a lot of technology into a very thin frame and they use a clever locking system for the backplate to hide any screws. The built in battery has a longer life than the Air and an SSD comes stock. The team points out that the Windows logo is etched on the backside instead of the standard ugly stickers; apparently this took quite a bit of teeth-pulling to get approved. Check out the full photo gallery which includes the fetish packaging and comparison shots to the Air and Dell Mini 9.

Distance Detecting Pc

March 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 55 Comments

distance

Reader [Joshua] sent in his latest project. using a sonar rangefinder, an Arduino, and some clever programming, he’s made is computer react to his distance from it. As you can see in the video after the jump, he has programmed it to change text size and background color depending on his distance from the screen. While he admits that his implementation doesn’t seem immediately useful, there’s lots of potential there. We can actually think of several uses. What would you use it for?