I had never heard of the term Bokeh before but I have seen the effect. I had no idea that the Bokeh Photography Effect was so easy to achieve. Thanks for the great video Matt.

The guys over at Super Touch have made a Dodgeball game that uses the Kinect, an iPhone and an iPad to play. The game uses a bunch of technology starting with the way the game modes are selected. There is no start button on the controller, the team has opted for a cube with modes printed on it to select game modes. The cube has an accelerometer, an Arduino and a Xbee module in it. The Arduino monitors the accelerometer and uses the Xbee to wirelessly send the cube orientation to the host computer. Two players use iPads and Iphones to send dodgeballs flying to the player standing in-front of the Kinect. Just like the game we all played in junior high, the main player needs to catch the ball with their hands or move to avoid it. The team hasn’t released the full details of the system but thanks to the Adafruit bounty we now have tons of Kinect details. There are lots of iPad and iPhone 4 deals around so getting the controllers at a good price should be quite simple. If you want to make the wireless connection simple there is actually an Arduino XBee shield available.

“This is our dodgeball game which uses the Kinect to control the main character whose goal it is to catch the balls with their hands while avoiding getting hit with the balls elsewhere. The players using the iPad and iPhone can send balls at the main player with the XY pad on the left and the button on the right. The longer the button is held down the more points the ball is worth, but if the main player catches it they get the points.”

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If you are wanting to jazz up your simple coffee table why not make an LED Table? We have seen other LED tables before but this one is made up from very simple parts and might be a great intro project to electronics. Nice thing about this design is since there are no controllers used there are no parts that need to be programmed, this means that once you solder the bits together and flip the switch you should be in business.

“Electronics

• 240 Leds
• 300 12v 470 ohm resistors
• 60 22k resistors
• 60 3 leg photo transistors
• 120 transistors (2N 3904 -J05)
• Spool of bailing wire
• Small spool of thin non stranded copper wire
• Ethernet cable or equivalent
• Simple SPST switch
• 12v DC bulb and holder
• Converted computer power supply
• Electronics grade solder
• Hot glue
• Electrical tape or shrink tubing
• Thins sheets of semi flexible clear plastic, I used the replaceable plastic face inserts from a face guard I no longer had the base for, “waste not want not”
• black silicone tubing, similar to kind used for fishing gear, or sling-shot”

If you were fortunate enough to have a Commodore 64 back in the day you probably remember playing all the cool games with the funky tunes playing in the background. This DIY SID Player project will let you listen to those old tunes on the go using a PIC microcontroller and some cool interface methods.

Via: Dangerous Prototypes

“The SSD1308 OLED displays the filesystem, and the rotary encoder is used to scroll up and down. By pressing the rotary encoder button one can change into a subdirectory or start a .sid tune for playing. The screen content is rendered into a framebuffer in RAM and transferred using DMA autonomously. In playing-mode the OLED displays some tune information, the selected subtune and the playing time.”