Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Now this looks cool. Voice activated (“take shot”) and easy to wear this could be very handy for all sorts or … things.
It uses an iSight and an Apple Powerbook housed in a backpack to do all the work. Funny, I don’t see anyone doing the same thing with a Dell or an IBM laptop…
The automatic collision avoidance is pretty cool and it’s done with 1D cameras. Normal cameras are 2D – they see up/down and left/right. The 1 D cameras are just a row of CCD elements like in a scanner that see just left and right. A computer samples the cameras about 20 times a second and looks for high contrast marks that are moving. As they move faster it can be assumed that they are getting closer and so the plane avoids them by turning away.
It only weighs 30 grams for a 80-centimeter wingspan and can flow inside a building for about 4 minutes. With its two 1-gram cameras, a gyroscope, and a small microcontroller onboard, it can detect walls and automatically avoid collisions. The team is now working on even smaller versions of these flying robots which will be used for search-and-rescue, reconnaissance, and inspection applications.
If your into making weird noises and also like to mess with a soldering iron maybe you should give circuit bending a try. That’s where you poke and prod around the electronics of a device (like a Speak-n-spell) and cause the output sounds to be changed in weird ways.
I think I did this by accident when I was a very small child, my father had and electronic piano that would pick up radio stations if you touched some components on the back. Me and my friends thought that is was pretty cool at the time, but then again we were about six.
…examples of game cartridges and portable systems that have been circuit bent to create a nice glitch aesthetic & sound…Jumpstart has been bending the Gauntlet game on Sega Master System II here.
This will certainly be showing up in modded cases soon. I’ve seen a few people use this technique on small robots to save weight or just to look cool.
Before nylon cable ties, bundles of cables were held together by waxed nylon cord. It’s still a nice way to to do harnesses in tight spaces
Don’t they look like iMacs? But truthfully, why on Earth would you want to put your chickens in something like this? Do people keep them as pets? I find that hard to believe, they are a phenomenally stupid creature – we do them a favor by eating them really.
Omlet makes these contemporary coops for urban dwellers and sells the chickens to go with them. Eglus are fitted throughout with wooden roosting bars and an integrated nesting box with privacy screen to preserve the chicken’s modesty when laying an egg.
The chickens are kept warm in the winter and cool in the summer with twin walled insulation. To make collecting your eggs easy, the eglu has an eggport which gives access to the nesting box. Upkeep of this coop is made easy via a slide out dropping tray and removable lid.
On the other hand, the rabbit houses might have some use. I can see having a rabbit as a pet.
[via MetaEfficient]
Omlet – Eglu
The Paper Forest has not failed to impress me yet again. I saw these at Boing Boing today, a flapping bat and a race track. The race track comes in two versions, realistic and cute. I’ll stick with the cute one myself. The flapping bat is huge, 16 inches long! If I were to start it now I might have it finished by Halloween (maybe).