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If you like skating have a look at this cool Automatic Skating Sound Effects project called Bauxite over at Skate Hack “Bauxite is an open source portable skateboard box embedded with piezoelectric sensors, customized hardware and software and portable loudspeakers. As the skateboarders ride on the box, the piezoelectric sensors convert physical vibrations into triggers and generate a selection of pre-recorded sound-samples amplified through loudspeakers. Skateboarders interact with Bauxite through tricks and movements transforming an ordinary skateboard box into a skateboard-powered music sampler!”
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You might remember the Rave Shades that were featured here last year, good news there is a new Kickstarter for a new and improved model, you only have 10 days to jump in though so act fast. For £100 you can get your very own in with blue or green LEDs. The new version is still PCB based but used bright SMD LEDs parts this time around. The display is a 24 x 8 LED matrix of LEDs that can be custom programmed using a simple to use graphical program. The new style looks more comfortable and is splash resistant so if you are caught in an all night outside party and you get a bit of rain you can still keep your Pixel Shades cranked.
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If you are looking to do some VR on a budget the Google’s Cardboard VR Headset is sure to fit. Google gave them out to attendees of Google I/O. If you don’t have a ready to go cardboard kit from I/O you can make your own from the plans that Google has posted here. This free app allows you to experience the activities listed below. “• Earth: Fly where your fancy takes you on Google Earth.
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Looks like Makible (creator of the MakiBox 3D printer) is going through some hard times. About 6 months ago we saw that they were ramping up production capacity due to the high demand for their $200 3D printer. It is hard to see a company that had such good intentions go through this struggle but people, materials and office space all add up and if there isn’t enough profit on each unit at the end of the day you will run into trouble no matter the volume, unless you are Amazon and have an ulterior motive and can afford to spend boat loads of money on a marketing idea. Thanks to Theone for mentioning this news. “The Makible team have been working very hard to restart production of orders and get shipping again. As shown in March, we are able to ship around 800 boxes a month when everything is in full production. We ran into a classic issue of startup hardware companies of cash flow not matching up, leaving us short of funds to complete shipments. We did see this event coming and worked hard to line up additional funding to keep things running smoothly, but nothing has been finalized and so we have been building consensus amongst our investors to implement a recovery plan. We have put in place a more robust operations team, and will be appointing a new board and focusing on getting the outstanding orders shipped before moving on to other things. We are currently working on the fundraising to make this happen.“ |
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When you think of rooting a device that lives in your pocket you will probably think of your smart phone. With the new Samsung NX300 Smart Camera you now have more pocket items to root. Lars shared this hack by Georg Lukas about Hacking the Samsung NX300 Camera and also rooting it. “Experience shows that most firmware images provide an easy way to run a user-provided shell script on boot. This feature is often added by the “software engineers” during development, but it boils down to a local root backdoor. On a camera, the SD card would be a good place to search. Other devices might execute code from an USB flash drive or the built-in hard disk. Usually, we have to start with the firmware update file (nx300.bin from this 241MB ZIP in our case), run binwalk on it, extract and mount the root file system and have our fun. In this case, however, the source archive from Samsung’s OSS Release Center contains an unpacked root file system tree in TIZEN/project/NX300/image/rootfs, so we just examine that: 
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Check out this Northrop Grumman X-47B RC Plane Build by Eric Maglio. “The internal structural parts were cut by laser from some 1/8″ plywood. They were assembled first, then glued inside the skins during the joining process. Much clamping ensured a tight fit. It was easiest to install the landing gear and doors next, while the model could still be rested inside the molds. All of the hinges are laser cut plywood, and no two are identical. This is because the many complex curves mean that the hinge geometry must be precisly controlled. Each gear door has it’s own small servo, and an Arduino controls the sequence of motions.”
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Check out this Robot that uses Kinect for Mapping that Sean Anderson, Kirk MacTavish, Daryl Tiong, Aditya Sharma from University of Waterloo built for their 4th year project. “Current accomplishments: |
