Today I would like to show you one of the few small projects I have been working on lately. For a long time I wanted to experiment with gyroscopes but unfortuantly they have been too expensive for me. This is the point where Nintendo comes to thw rescue. With the Nintendo Wii, a lot of very interesting and expensive sensors have been made available to the humble hacker. In this case I made usage of the so called Motion Plus Sensor, which is essentialy a 3 axis gyroscope. The module is available for about 17€ (new).
Ishikawa-Komuro Laboratory has created an incredible fast robotic hand. It can dribble a small ball so fast, that most average humans can’t even catch up with their eyes! Speaking of catching, that’s also one of its specialties. Catching a ball, a mobile phone, you name it. Oh and BTW, it catches the object with its fingertips.
Just imagine if whole robots were that fast and dextrous. That would make robot soccer really interesting to watch.
For the few people how read this Blog, I have to apologize for beeing absent for such a long time. The last few Months I have been busy, you know places to go, people to meet, thing like that.
Again I am presenting a speech from TED.com about a new gadget (work is still in progress) that could very well change the way we live.
Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry are showing us a new wearable gadget, called SixthSense, that helps us to access and use the overwhelming amount of Informations that is available to us. It consists of a camera that is pointed to the general direction that you are looking at, a miniature projector and, as I understand it, lots of ingenious software.
The user controlls it simply by moving his fingers. Making a frame with your hands lets you make a Picture of the scene, holding up a product can give you various amounts of informations about it and so on. The implications of such a device and it uses seem to be endless!
Hans Rosling is giving a very interesting presentation on TED about our views of the so called 3rd world countries and what is actually true about it.
The statistics he is presenting are visualized by an ingenious piece of software. The software itself has been bought by google and can now be used by everyone in the form of the google gadget “Motion Chart”.
Seriously, don’t you think that sometimes the office is split into 2 different factions? Like engineering and accounting? Or engineering and management?
Wouldn’t it be fun to settle the scores once and for all? I am pretty sure if that would be possible, it would look like this:
While we are still waiting for conventional jet packs to become feasible enough to brings us to work every day, we might enjoy some little fun with these water powered jet packs:
Granted, you need a very long hose attached to it but it still looks like a lot of fun.
Wickedlasers.com has again suprised us (or not?) with another ridiculous device: The Torch!
Its a flashlight that packs the power of a halogen lamp, bright and hot enough to set things on fire and to prepare scrambled eggs with. The special battery pack it uses is sufficient for 15min usage.
Great toy, but not worth the money I think. 300 Bucks is quite a lot for a halogen lamp and a Lithium battery pack. The battery charger is also capable of destroying the battery pack if used incorrectly, as far as I have heard.
Also IMHO, making a flashlight out of military grade aluminum or aerospace grade aluminum is pretty much pointless unless you want to whack people with it.
Finally a website, that combines the joy of cooking, with the precise instructions of engineering.
If you want to know, I discovered that website while looking for a good and comprehensible recipe for Soufflé. Yeah, that’s right, I am looking for Soufflé recipes on the Internet. So what? Wanna fight about it?
