The perfect present for under the tree… These Genpets were designed to create a stir and it seems they did. Check out this site to see how they were advertised, and this site explains how they were really created and why.

“This piece is a mix of design, industry, art and science. The sculpture consists of nineteen plastic packages hung from store hooks displaying streamlined, mass produced Bio-engineered life. The setup is complimented by small video displays, posters, and a product catalogue, which display information and video clips about the products.

Each package consists of custom vacuum formed plastic surrounding a foam latex animatron; Strange animals, grown and altered, by bioengineering, but clearly mammalian. They are twitching, shaking, clawing, and head butting their packaging but twist ties keep them held in place. Feeding tubes supply the creatures with nourishment, as well as electricity for the glowing “fresh strips” and heart monitors. But these are not plastic toys, these are mass produced, copyrighted life; modified for consumption.

These animals have been deemed worthless and marketed as midrange children’s toys. Like curiosities, they are on display but not in glass jars, rather plastic. They are tethered, but for practicality, not for security, and these cables demonstrate their relationship of utter dependency and submission right away upon birth. They are asleep in their packages complacently waiting to join their new homes as one more possession as the latest and greatest form of consumable technology.”

Thanks Zalo

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Have a look at the projects over at Benthack, if you like circuit bending you will get a kick out of the projects. If you don’t know what circuit bending is you soon will.

“A friend gave me an old master keyboard, the roland pc-200. i decided to transform it in a keytar, a strap-on keyboard. i’ve used two guitar/bass knobs for strap and two buttons (bending up and modulation) and one swich (for permanent modulation). it’s easy to do bendings with the joystick (even if it has no neck like other keytar) but with the button it’s nicer.”

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This DIY orb by UK-Dave reminds me of the orb made by Ambient Devices. Dave has taken about $60.00 of electronics to create a device that can be remotely controlled from a computer. All the source code for the PIC based microcontroller is available on his site.

“The Orb is my attempt at building an ambient interface. It consists of a number of high-brightness red, green and blue LEDs, a PIC microprocessor and a radio receiver for communication with a computer. The PIC uses PWM to control the brightness of the LEDs allowing the Orb to fade through all the colours of the rainbow. The radio link uses an easy-Radio module to provide a wireless (433MHz) RS232 serial link. This allows software on the computer to control the colour of the Orb based on any events you like, e.g. new email, msn contact coming online, share prices changing, etc.

The housing for the Orb is actually a Mathmos Aduki with its insides removed. It’s perhaps an expensive option for an enclosure but it does look rather nice. Alternatively you could use some other non-transparent plastic enclosure.”

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If you are looking for a bit more head-room in your school bus you could consider raising the roof by installing a van on the roof. To ensure maximum room make sure the van has a roof that can also be raised.

The people over at MIT are at it again, check out this cool robot.

“Domo is a new upper-torso humanoid robot at the MIT CSAIL Humanoid Robotics Lab. It is the doctoral work of Aaron Edsinger. The goal of Domo is to contribute a novel approach to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. The approach is centered on integrating compliant and force sensitive manipulators into a behavior based architecture that accomplishes useful manipulation tasks in human environments.”

Via: TechEBlog

You can’t create very much resistive heat using a USB port. This all changes when you have 30! Barbeque anyone?

“Because you did the last time with just the USB1 port, it failed, but if it tries thinking, don’t you think? there is no reason which can do the fried egg by the electric power of 2.5W. If is it should have increased simply it is not? With being the case that it is said, we had decided to challenge 6 USB extended cards of 5 ports with the total 30 port.”

Via: BoingBoing and Make

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You too can build a small very functional PIC scope! Steven from Semifluid.com has gone all out with this creation. Check out his site for the project source code.

“Using the PIC18F2550 GLCD Text Test as a basis for further experimentation, I put together a simple and accurate graphical oscilloscope using a PIC18F2550 microcontroller and a AGM1264F graphical LCD. The oscilloscope measures the average voltage, the maximum voltage, the minimum voltage, the peak-to-peak voltage, and the zero-crossing frequency for a DC signal over 100 samples”