Doesn’t look all that comfortable but this Keyboard Chair sure is unique. I am curious where all the keyboards came from? I hope they were salvaged but they were probably purchased for this sculpture. They should have completed it by mounting a right and left side of a split keyboard on each of the arm rests. The chair could then have a single keyboard USP jack and actually be used to type.

Via: Adafruit

We have featured Matt Denton’s hexapod designs in the past. He has been spending some time working on a project that is a bit bigger than the previous ones! His new design which has been 4 years in the making called Mantis is a Hexapod Walking Machine. He has taken lots of pictures in the Facebook page (a few can be seen below). This video done by Daily Planet talks about Matt and his machines.

This 2.2-litre Turbo Diesel-powered, British-designed and -built walking machine can be piloted or remote WiFi-controlled, stands 2.8 metres high with a five meter working envelope and weighing in at just under two tonnes.”

NAND Gates are very versatile. You might remember back in the TTL days when you were out of a specific chip you could always grab a NAND chip out of the bin and re-purpose it to work. This NANDputer looks like it would be a bit harder to troubleshoot than the one that I am using to write this on!

“While the CPU architecture is fairly conventional, the way it is implemented isn’t.  I went with a bit-serial setup on here to save gates.  The ALU for example is only 1 bit, with a “latching” carry so operations are performed a bit at a time on the 8 bit registers/memory.  The program counter is also bit-serial, and on the first youtube video you can see the carry propagating during the incrementing of it.

The downside of course is that this is much slower than a parallel architecture, but this way takes vastly fewer gates.  It takes 96 clock cycles to run a single instruction:  There’s 16 “T” states and 3 non-overlapping clocks generated using a 6 stage johnson counter with some NAND decoding.   (The flipflops that form the johnson counter are made from NANDs too).  Thus, it’s 16*9 or 96 cycles per instruction.  The clock runs at 10MHz, so this is a bit over 100KIPs (thousands of instructions per second).  This sounds really slow but it isn’t TOO slow.  It’s faster than a TMS1000, and it’s only 2-3x slower than a Commodore 64 which I estimate at 250-300kips when it runs at 1MHz (3 and 4 cycle instructions being some of the more common ones).”

This Wind Tunnel Computer looks like a piece of high tech hardware from a testing laboratory but under the black paint is MDF and a window box fan! This configuration was designed for optimal cooling of the computer components that you can see in the center of the two outer angled boxes.

“I used an anemometer (velocity/airspeed meter) for testing, as well as different fans and basic shapes made out of cardboard. I was able to conclude that I could increase air velocity through a scale wind tunnel. There are two types of wind tunnels; the one I’ve built is a subsonic wind tunnel. This type of design involves a contraction section which is used to increase velocity (airspeed) through the test section. This increase in airspeed was what I looking for, a way to increase airspeed over the computer components.”

Check out this Leap Motion device that Stephane Bersot made into a cool MIDI controller to play drums, guitar pitch and the piano EQ.

Thanks for the tip James.

Manuel Beithner sent in this open source project called MusicBeam that they have been working on for the last 6 months. It will allow you to have a laser light like show at your next party using your projector. They are taking requests so if you don’t want to develop your own custom effect I am sure if it is cool enough they will add the effect into the released version.

“Fire up your video projector, invite your neighbours, maybe the girl you met in the elevator the other day, throw in a fog machine and start your weekend with a bang. Your one of the first to know about this so go ahead and feel special. Over 6 month ago we started to develop a software which enables everyone (Mac,Winows Linux) to use his/her video projector to create a music-triggered laser show. All you need is a laptop, a projector and a fog-machine to enhance the awesomeness. The Software is not only free of charge but open source, and we´d like to share it with everyone.”

Most of you have probably seen server rooms with blade servers, it is basically a rack where you can slide in some servers. Paul Ruby Jr. sent in his Dual Computer Custom Desk build where he has two slide in computers except they are drawer size. This desk as everything you need for your personal computing needs including a hidden UPS. The only thing I can think that would improve the system is to use Synergy so that a single keyboard and mouse can be used to control both systems.

“The desk is made out of stained Hickory wood.  The top of the desk is a sheet of Formica that matches my work counters.  In the picture of the front of the desk, you can see the wooden (oak) exhaust fan grills.  I put a 120mm lighted (blue) exhaust fan for each computer drawer compartment.  This is more than enough to keep each computer from overheating.”