Heads-up Display Mounts On Brim Of Your Cap

March 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Matt Kwan] says that coming up with a personal heads-up display wasn’t that hard. Well that’s because he made design choices that make all the difference.

The goal here was to add some augmented reality to his field of vision. He went with a baseball cap because it’s a pretty easy way to strap something to your head. You can’t see it from this angle, but the setup requires you to cut a rather large hole in brim. The image from a smartphone (HTC Desire Z in this case) which is situated with the screen pointing toward [Matt’s] forehead. The screen reflects off of a small mirror, guiding the image down through a Fresnel lens mounted in the hole of the brim. The image is reflected a second time by the plastic in front of his eyes which is coated with a slightly mirrored material. Since the image is reflected twice it appears right-side up, and the use of the Fresnel lens places the image out about 20 cm in front of his view. He tried to get some images of the effect, but we think you’ve got to see it in person before passing judgement.

This does away with the need to track head movement (there’s a few hacks for that out there though). Augmented reality software is used to turn the view from the smartphone camera into overlay data for the display.

[Thanks Tom]

Fashion Leads To Mind-controlled Skirt-lifting Contraption

March 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This must be an example of when worlds collide. Who would have thought the geekery of Mindflex and Arduino could make its way into high fashion? But sure enough, this dress transforms based on the mental concentration of the model (must resist urge to crack joke here).

Details are a bit sparse, but you can get a look at the prototype in the video after the break. There’s no nudity; a larger skirt covers a more plain version. That over-skirt is connected to some type of motor system which is driven by an Arduino. When the EEG sensor in the hat detects a certain level of brain wave activity, the outer skirt is lifted and pulled to the back of the outfit, exposing the tighter version beneath.

[Lorenzo] wrote in to share the link to this garment hack. He mentions that a Lilypad and Mindflex are at work here. Looking more into the artist’s website we find this isn’t the only tech-wear produced. There’s a maternity outfit which can sense the baby’s beating heart, and harvest other data about both mother and baby, as well as a few others.

We can’t think this has much future as an everyday outfit, but more utilitarian versions are out there so we think the sky’s the limit on wearable tech.

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Check It Out, My Clothes Are Electric. No, Seriously

February 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Someday you may be able to use your crotch or armpits to recharge that cellphone. Heck, maybe there won’t even be a battery, just a capacitor which gets its juice from Power Felt, a fabric that converts body heat to electricity.

Now we mention the nether-regions because it’s funny, but also because it makes the most sense. Researchers have developed a fabric containing carbon nanotubes used in a way that generates electricity based on a temperature differential. We figure the areas on the body that have high heat loss would be the most efficient locations for the fabric since it is currently extremely expensive to produce (the hope is that mass-production would reduce cost by orders of magnitude). So we think battery-charging briefs are a definite possibility.

What we see here is a nano-scale Peltier electricity generator. It’s the same concept as this candle-based generator, except the increased efficiency of the Power Felt lets your wasted body heat take the place of the flame.

There’s a white paper on the topic but you can’t get at it without surrendering some [George Washingtons].

[via Reddit and Megadgets]

Live Out Your Inner Animist With Animatronic Cat Ears

February 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

While having a great white shark as your spirit animal may sound cool, we’ve found walking around in public wearing a gigantic set of mechanical jaws to be a bit of a hindrance. [abetusk] doesn’t have that problem; he can wear his awesome animatronic cat ears anywhere he pleases.

The build was inspired by these extremely Japanese animatronic ears loaded with EEG hardware to read the emotional state of the wearer. [abetusk] decided that tearing apart some brain scanning hardware was too much work for not enough benefit, so he decided servos controlled by push buttons would be just fine.

On the electronic side of the build, servos attached to a head band are controlled by an ATtiny13. A single button goes through three states for the ears: a long button press is surprise, a tap followed by a long hold is angry or sad, and tapping three times is an ‘ear wink.’ All of the code is up on GitHub, and you can check out these cat ear emotions with [abetusk]’s lovely assistant in the video after the break.

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Dice Gauntlet Joins Cosplay With D&D Gaming

February 9, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

If you needed a reason to dress up for your next Dungeons & Dragons adventure this is surely it. Not only will this attractive wrist adornment go right along with your medieval theme, but the gauntlet doubles as a multi-sided digital die.

Sparkfun whipped up this tutorial which details the build. Yep, they’re hawking their own goods but we must say this is one of the few projects using sewable electronics which we thoroughly enjoy. It calls for several Lilypad modules, including an Arduino board, accelerometer, and slide switches. The switches let you select the number of sides for the die you are about to roll. The accelerometer starts the fun when you shake your wrist back and forth (that’s what she said). The project is powered by a rechargeable battery, which we always like to see, and uses a four-digit seven segment display located where the face of a wristwatch is normally found.

Of course, you could get the shaking action and use no batteries at all if you wish.

Sound Reactive Kanye Glasses!

January 1, 2012 by Jesse Congdon 14 Comments

[Ch00f] has decided to ring in the new year with some el wire Kanye glasses. Technically the term for the glasses is either “shutter shades” or “slatted sunglasses”, invented around the 80s by [Alain Mikli] and originally given the nickname “Venetian Sunglasses”. Kanye West evidently got his own retro redesign by the original creator and the rest is history. That is enough Wikipedia for now. [Ch00f] has augmented the original design with six multicolor tracks of EL wire mounted to the shutters of the glasses. The EL wire is fed back through several discrete wires around the wearers ear and to two control boxes. As the video shows, the glasses function as a crude V/U meter based on the audio received by the driver circuit.

Instead of the typical microcontroller [Ch00f] (who has some kind of deep seated issues agaist the Arduino) decided to go full blown analog with the entire design. The audio signal is fed through various Op Amp circuits first amplifying the weak microphone signal then filtering with a low pass filter to focus on the bass frequencies. The filtered bass is then sent to an envelope detector to turn the audio wave into a DC voltage signal. Keeping with the Op Amp design [Ch00f] then uses a resistor ladder and six comparator circuits (with TRIACs on their outputs) to tune the trigger voltage levels of the EL bars. The TRIACs get to deal with the 100 or so volts for the EL strips so that [Ch00f] doesn’t have to party with six EL power supplies in his pocket. For those of you counting at home, that is a total of 13 Op Amps.

The results are fantastic, check the video below to see the glasses in action. Reportedly the circuit does freak out and lock all of the TRIACs in an on state, but a covert flip of the power switch fixes the issue for now. [Ch00f] admits that the project was rather rushed due to the impending new year’s eve party, but now that that is all over with we just need to get [Ch00f] to roll out a stereo version. If you need more [ch00f] we have covered a few of his projects before such as his Icebreaker POV toy hack and a ghetto accelerometer using a reflection sensor.

Thanks for the tips [Daniel] and [Sanchoooo], also via [reddit]. Happy new year!

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Muff-Fones Sound Dirty; Well, Not Literally

December 12, 2011 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Baby, it’s cold outside. But that doesn’t stop [Grissini] from listening to some tunes when not indoors. He added headphones to a pair of ear warmers. We guess you could call them ear muffs, which is where the name comes from. But these are the newer type that wrap around the back of your head.

[Grissini] picked up a set of headphones that similarly wrap around the back of your head. After pulling the speakers out of their plastic enclosures he needed a way to soften the sharp edges when they’ll be pressed against your ears. Sugru once again shows its versatility by providing a soft, self-bonding, and moldable surface. The last step is dead simple, as the ear warmers already have a fabric pocket by each ear perfect for accepting the speakers.

Now we need this to go one step further, by making them wireless. We figure hacking in a bluetooth headset board would make it work with your cellphone. Or you could roll your own minimal MP3 board and house it in the part that wraps around your neck.