This Recycled Alien Bike is certainly one that you will not find in your local bike dealership. It was made entirely from scrap metal by Bangkok artist Roongrojna Sangwongprisarn. It reminds me of the crazy Skull Bike we saw back in 2006.

Via: UniqueDaily

“Roongrojna Sangwongprisarn, 54, created it out of spare parts in his workshop in Thailand. He has four shops across the country – named the Ko Art Shop – and exports his creations to clients all over the world.”

The prize this week is a loupe magnifier, this will let you get a close look at whatever you are working on. This contest will run for one week (July 30 – August 5, 2011). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above. This time we will need the specific make of the device.

Please do not give the answer in the comments.

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

• The name of the item in the above picture
• An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

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Added September 18, 2011

Sorry for the delay in the winner announcement.

The item to guess was iRiver Story HD eBook Reader

The winner is William A. (there were 87 entries)

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Below is a picture of the prize.

This Talking Robot Mouth looks a bit creepy but works amazingly well. This robotic mouth is making sounds the same way we do. The mouth is made of various silicone materials blended together and the nose has the same function ours does when it comes to the creation of human vocals. The most impressive thing is that the robot learns as it talks, there is a microphone which allows the system to listen to hear the output so it can make modifications to future speech.

“We’ve given the robot the score for the song Kagome, kagome. It’s already learned how to make the sound “ka,” and it’ll retrieve that information from its brain. The robot’s also learned how to change a sound’s pitch by changing the air flow, so it’ll retrieve that data. In other words, it’ll use the information already in its brain to make sounds, while estimating speech movements based on the score. So all we are giving it is the words and the pitch.”

RobotGrrl (Erin Kennedy) has been working on RoboBrrd for a long time, she has now made an iPad app which lets you feed the bird various fruits, the app communicates with the bird via a Redpark serial cable. The on-board Arduino deciphers the commands to perform the appropriate actions such as flapping its wings or chewing on the fruit. The Redpark cable comes with an iOS SDK which allows the developer to use the serial cable in no time. Erin shows us how she wrote the iPad and Arduino code in the second half of the video.

Metalfusion from Finland has developed an interesting method of creating CNC routed halftone images using a single v-bit router bit. Just like a news paper prints images using dots of ink this process produces dots of different sizes by plunging the v-bit to varying depths. He has developed the software which allows normal images to be converted into files that are ready to be cut on a CNC machine. It isn’t a quick process though for example the apple image is recreated with 3774 individual dots.

3D printing no longer seems to have the wow factor that it did a few years ago, I remember how crazy it seemed a year and a half ago when when Bradley Rigdon demonstrated how to print a 3D bearing. Most of us have now seen something that has been printed in a 3D printer. This is thanks in large part to the MakerBot which has brought inexpensive 3D printing to the masses. Ponoko who has sponsored one of our contests in the past is offering color 3D printing with some impressive results. They have featured an interesting video that was done for National Geographic which was produced to make the technology seem even more magical than it is. I am sure that you will catch the issues that are smoothed over in the apparent recreation of the wrench in the above video. I was thinking that the scanner was some magical creation or there was about 5 hours of time that lapsed between scanning and printing so they could make the scan work. Watch the video below for the truth in what happened in the creation of the tool. If you are curious what Bradley Rigdon from Print to 3D is up to have a look at the 3rd video where he demonstrates the 3D transmission he is making.

Greg from Electronicsnerd will be building some RF projects over the next few days. Today he presents an AM Broadcast Band Rejection Filter for Shortwave Reception which is based on the work of Joseph J. Carr. You can find the circuit in this article (PDF). With only 7 components it’s a simple circuit that could be built in a short time.

“With an eye toward proper RF construction techniques, I kept lead lengths short and the components in a line from input to output. The SparkFun board I used doesn’t have huge traces (which at RF tend to perform like little antennas) and I’m happy with the clean build. The best way to construct this would have been on a nice copper ground plane, but I wanted to pop this together in an hour and see if it worked. Next I’ll put the filter in a nice metal box with overlapping edges. The finished product will sit between a long-wire antenna and the G3′s external antenna input.”