Looks like the DREAD could be a popular future weapon.

“Imagine a gun with no recoil, no sound, no heat, no gunpowder, no visible firing signature (muzzle flash), and no stoppages or jams of any kind. Now imagine that this gun could fire .308 caliber and .50 caliber metal projectiles accurately at up to 8,000 fps (feet-per-second), featured an infinitely variable/programmable cyclic rate-of-fire (as high as 120,000 rounds-per-minute), and were capable of laying down a 360-degree field of fire. What if you could mount this weapon on any military Humvee (HMMWV), any helicopter/gunship, any armored personnel carrier (APC), and any other vehicle for which the technology were applicable?

That would really be something, wouldn’t it? Some of you might be wondering, “how big would it be”, or “how much would it weigh”? Others might want to know what it’s ammunition capacity would be. These are all good questions, assuming of course that a weapon like this were actually possible.

According to its inventor, not only is it possible, it’s already happened.”

Via: TechEBlog

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Don’t know much about this, Targit posted a link to his creation in this Hackaday article (comment #16). If anyone knows about some construction plans I would be interested!

If you have an Etch a Sketch in the closet collecting dust, the Etch CNC may be an interesting project that could put it back into use.

“I am using a retrofit machine that fit within my budget. It’s a 2-axis machine with approximately 170x130mm travel.

The circuit board is my own design, using a ULN2803 per motor to supply approx. 0.3 amps per winding. The power supply is a standard AT hard-drive power connector, with the +12V used to power the motors. It’s a simple constant-voltage L/R drive. I made the circuit board using EAGLE, and milled it on Chris’s real CNC milling machine (which is powered by EMC and AXIS, of course). “

This rubber band LEGO crossbow isn’t as dangerous as this one. But I wouldn’t want to be standing in front of it when it goes off!

Once you have a look at this EM Pistol, and watch the video you will probably want to get in line to buy your own!

“# Two coils are precisely pulsed in sequence
(350 Amp peak) to fire a steel projectile
# Two infrared sensors detect the projectile
position within the firing tube
# Controlled by a PIC microcontroller
# Powered by 8 AA NiCd battery pack
# Built-in battery charger
# Bar display tracks capacitor bank charge
progress
# Battery and Fault LED indicators
# Laser targeting sight
# Makes no sound when fired”

You probably remember the Shock Clock from a while ago. Well this Zedomax RGB LED Alarm Clock is the oposite of that concept, I think it would be soothing to wake up to this clock…

“Okay, we have seen some really cool Light Orbs while trying to make this Music Syncing Light Orb Alarm Clock. We started with Tod’s creation and soon realize that 1 LED will not be bright enough in slightest light conditions though his Light Orb is tight let us say. So we checked out RGB lights at Hackedgadgets.com. Which is cool and uses 4 Red, 3 Green, and 3 Blue LEDs. After we made the actual prototype and put the Orb on top, The 4 LEDs in series worked great even in lots of light. So best thing I think here is to test your LEDs on a breadboard first before soldering them. Even if the rated voltage of the LED says it’d work, we found that sometimes logic does not always work. Burn test your LEDs at least for 20 minutes and make sure they are still working before soldering anything…”

This Automated License Plate Recognition system makes short work of looking up massive numbers of license plates. I wonder if there is a system that will make the plate appear fine while looking at it but cause a mis-read when read in using the camera system?

“Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology is made up of several elements.

Platefinder – Sophisticated firmware continually searches the camera’s field of view for the presence of a license plate.

Dual Lens Camera – As a license plate is detected, the dual lens camera is triggered to capture both color and infrared images of the vehicle and plate. Infrared cameras are able to see license plates regardless of sun glare, darkness, or other adverse conditions.
Triple Flash

“Triple Flash” patented feature captures multiple images”

Triple Flash Technology – This patented technology varies the flash, shutter and gain settings of the camera to capture multiple plate images, ensuring the highest quality photo regardless of light or weather conditions. Only the image determined to produce the highest quality read is sent on for processing.

Optical Character Recognition “Engine” – Unlike some players in the ALPR community, PIPS does not use generic OCR engine for all states and regions. PIPS uses a customized OCR engine specific to the state or region of interest. PIPS OCR engines are very tolerant of skewed and off-axis plate reads, various plate sizes, syntax rules, and designs. The engine reads the captured infrared plate image and converts it to a data file.

Processors – In addition to housing the patented platefinder and triple flash technologies, PIPS processors perform the OCR translation and can use the captured data in a variety of ways via a PIPS software application or 3rd party solution.

Application Software– Software interfaces, specific to the industry or application, allow the user of the system to easily view and manage the data.”