Macintosh Plus DJ Helmet With An IPad

January 14, 2011 by James Munns 39 Comments

Elaborate helmets are not a new concept, with many famous artists such as Daft Punk and Deadmau5 using them for stage shows. For a sculpture class, [Terrence] fashioned his own out of the body of a Macintosh Plus and an iPad conveniently sourced from eBay. After gutting the insides, the Mac Plus was fitted with parts from a helmet both for comfort as well as for keeping the whole setup head mounted. For additional eye candy, an LED visualizer was affixed below the iPad display. The rig is remotely controlled by a bluetooth keyboard, just for good measure. We think this setup easily stands up to other Daft Punk-esque style head mounts.

Be sure not to miss the video of the helmet featuring DJ Chameleon (a friend of [Terrence]) in action, as well as a number of other photos.

[Edit: Thanks to everyone who caught the Mac Plus/Pro error!]

Make The Wedding Ring Speak To Her

January 5, 2011 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

It’s a nice touch to engrave a heartfelt message on a wedding band, and my couples choose to do so. But you can say a lot more with a 20 second audio message. That’s exactly what [Luke Jerram] did by etching an audio track into this ring. He uses his custom-built hardware to playback the message, which you can see in the video after the break. The ring is an Edison Cylinder, which works just like a modern record player except that the media is on a spinning drum (the ring) instead of a rotating disk. We wonder if this would sound a bit better with a high-end cylinder player.

While you’re on [Luke’s] page you might as well take a look at his image projecting ring as well. It has a color image slide on one side and a projection lens on the other. Wacky!

Continue reading “Make The Wedding Ring Speak To Her” →

‘Tis The Season To Decorate Bags With EL Wire

December 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

We hope you’ve already got parts on hand for your holiday projects because shipping might be a little slow at this time of year. But if you’ve got a bag and some unused EL wire here’s a one-day project you should try. Make yourself a Tron-inspired shoulder bag, or backpack.

On the right, [PT] is doing fantastic job of modeling with his electroluminescent offering. This is another Adafruit offering that holds your hand each step of the way from designing, to sewing, to wiring it up. This will go great with that glowing unitard he’s been working on.

[Alan Yates] has also done a spectacular job with his Tron backpack seen on the left. He picked up his EL wire on clearance at a place called “big-W” after Christmas last year. They were selling 3 meter segments (each with their own inverter) for just $3. We’re happy he got a deal and even more pleased that he found a use for it.

[Thanks Drone]

Add Explosive Power To Your Hi-five

December 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 58 Comments

It’s been a while since there was any advances made in the field if celebratory high-five-ing. [Eli Skipp] just finished her contribution, moving the art forward by adding the sound of explosions to her high-fives. Ignore the audio sync problems in the video after the break to see her Arduino and Wave Shield based offering. It uses a flex sensor to detect a high-five and has a bit of software filtering to avoid misfires when moving your hand or setting it down on a flat surface. It may look a bit ridiculous right now because of the bulk, but we could see a sleeker, cheaper version hitting toy and novelty stores everywhere.

Less useful than a sign-language translating glove, but easier to code and some would say more fun too. Continue reading “Add Explosive Power To Your Hi-five” →

Haptic Feedback For The Blind

December 17, 2010 by Chris Nelson 32 Comments

[polymythic] Is helping the blind see with his haptic feedback device called HALO. At the heart of the device is an Arduino Mega 2560 which senses objects with a few ultrasonic range finders and then relays the information back to the user using some vibration motors from old cell phones. The user can feel the distance by the frequency at which the motor pulses. The faster the motors pulse the closer an object is.

This kind of sensing is something that it can be applied to pretty much any sensor allowing the user to feel something that might be otherwise invisible. While haptic feedback is nothing new its good to see continuing work with new sensors and different setups.

Home Built Knitting Machine

December 17, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 25 Comments

Wow, we knew it wouldn’t be too long before we would see a fully automated home built knitting machine show up. We recently posted a hack where people were emulating the keyboard input of a commercial knitting machine, and that was pretty awesome, but we knew we would be seeing some hacked together machines soon. [corex37] hasn’t let us down with this beast. It is mainly composed of old printer parts, a couple servos, and a Picaxe 18-x microcontroller. It seems to do a good job right now, but lets hope he keeps going. It would be cool to see it able to change colors like the other one.

[via Make]

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Shooting Fireballs From Your Wrists – Hadouken!

December 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

[Glass Giant’s] wrist-mounted fireball launcher adds a little stage magic to his life. This method of fire production is several orders of magnitude less dangerous than other arm-attached flamethrowers or instrument-mounted torches. The module, which is strapped to the underside of his wrist, stores and lights a combination of flash cotton and flash paper. The two flammables are housed in a small aluminum tube touching a glow plug. A slider switch acts as a safety, completing the circuit from the battery, to the glow plug, terminating in a mercury switch which heats things up when held at the proper level. He’s still working out the best way to load the flash materials but as you can see in the video after the break, this is definitely worthy of the Street Fighter reference.

Continue reading “Shooting Fireballs From Your Wrists – Hadouken!” →