Our friend Pyrofer wrote in about his new VFD Clock.

“It sets itself via NTP and adjusts for daylight savings time so no buttons and it never needs adjusting. It can be monitored via SNMP for logging the temperature and checking system uptime. The entire SNTP stack was written from scratch and it all fits in one AVR 328P.

For a screen I am using a salvaged VFD from an old Fruit Machine. 16 character 14 segment display with serial input.
Main control board is an ardiuno clone from eBay.
Connectivity is via a WizNet5100 board.
There is also a Dallas 1-wire Temperature probe because why not?”

Jeff Buswell, Clifford Chou and Andrew Knauss from Cornell university made a cool Ultrasonic Range Finder with Haptic Feedback called The Bat Hat for their ECE 4760: Final Project. 

“For our ECE 4760 final project, we designed and implemented an ultrasonic range-finding hat that uses haptic feedback to alert its wearer about obstacles in his or her path. The hat is equipped with an ultrasonic transmitter/receiver circuit, which is capable of emitting short pulses of ultrasonic-frequency (approximately 40 kHz) sound, at a level of about 120 dB. These pulses then echo off the closest object in the line of sight of the hat and are picked up by the receiver. The time delay between sending the initial pulse and receiving the echo gives a sense of how far away the obstacle is from the ultrasonic sensor, which can be conveyed to the person by vibrating the hat at a level proportional to that distance.”

Punch Through Design which includes Colin Karpfinger who has been featured here before have been working hard on the next project. They have come up with an interesting product concept called LightBlue Cortado that already has almost 1500 backers and has surpassed their goal of generating $20K in pre-orders by more than $66K. You still have 25 days to jump in at the pre-order price of around $20. This device introduces an interesting concept of embedded development without wires tethering the device to your computer. It uses Bluetooth to communicate with things around it and with the low price point I can see this thing being used in some cool projects where price and complexity would have been a barrier in the past. 

“Tech Specs

Lots of things are programmable these days. If you hop into most modern cars you will see switches for things like ride comfort, traction control, performance style etc. When you hop on a bike you would expect the ride to stay consistent. John Brack, David Dang and Broc SommerMeyer from Colorado State have built this Arduino based Bike Shock Project which Allows the Shock to be Programmable. It uses metallic particles suspended in oil which is acted upon by a magnetic coil which allows the fluid to thicken when magnetized. Feedback is provided to the system using a potentiometer that allows the system to apply the correct amount of electro magnetic energy to provide the desired ride. 

Brian Dorey is working on a DIY Pick and Place Machine that look like it is coming along very well. You can see the full build log of the machine on his site here. You can see some information here about the vision system that will be used.

“The component selector is controlled via an Arduino Mini and this interfaces to a Smooth Stepper Ethernet board which is controlled via Mach3 on the Windows PC. The custom app we have written uses a CSV config file of the components to place and this is then converted into the G-Code needed by Mach 3 and also other commands to control the suction relays, LED lighting and camera control and the Arduino powered component selector system.”

This Morphing Table Surface (PDF) by professor Hiroshi Ishii and his students, Sean Follmer, Daniel Leithinger, Alex Olwal and Akimitsu Hogge is one of the most intuitive morphing surfaces I have ever seen. Not only are your gestures duplicated on the interactive surface, there is also an image mapped onto the duplicated surface.

Via: dailypicksandflicks.com

“Past research on shape displays has primarily focused on rendering content and user interface elements through shape output, with less emphasis on dynamically changing UIs. We propose utilizing shape displays in three different ways to mediate interaction: to facilitate by providing dynamic physical affordances through shape change, to restrict by guiding users with dynamic physical constraints, and to manipulate by actuating physical objects. We outline potential interaction techniques and introduce Dynamic Physical Affordances and Constraints with our inFORM system, built on top of a state-of-the-art shape display, which provides for variable stiffness rendering and real-time user input through direct touch and tangible interaction. A set of motivating examples demonstrates how dynamic affordances, constraints and object actuation can create novel interaction possibilities.”

If you are in Australia don’t look to the street for your package delivery, look to the sky! A company called Flirtey is developing a  robust hexacopter drone that will be able to fly autonomously from warehouse to your current location in minutes carrying your purchases. To start they will be delivering books from Zookal, a textbook rental service. To use the service you would select the book you desire on your smart phone and a Flirtey will be dispatched to your location based on the GPS  of your phone. You grab your package and the Flirtey returns to base. This idea sounds possible but I think it still has a long way to go. What happens when the Flirtey doesn’t return home because some hacker wanted it to make a copter of his own? It sounds like they are building a ton of redundancy into the platform to allow for flight with a missing prop and one failed battery but eventually it will come crashing to earth and hit someone on the head. What is going to happen then?

Here is hoping we see lots of these things flying around all everywhere but I think it will be a challenge.

Via: OhGizmo and TechCrunch