Want to annoy IronJungle? Tweet a bunch of commands to his Twitter Robot Hand! His hand is monitoring the Twitter stream using a Raspberry PI and will act on your commands (seen below).

 ”A Raspberry PI monitors the tweets to @OurCatDoor.  The PI’s GPIO acts as inputs to a PICAXE 18M2 which controls five servos on a robot hand.

You can control the “The Hand of PI” by sending a tweet to @OurCatDoor.   Ifyour tweet includes any of the text below, the “Hand of PI” obeys your command.
Valid commands are (lowercase):
one (holds up one finger)
peace (shows the two finger peace sign)
three (three fingers up)
hookem (if you are a Texas Longhorn fan this one makes sense)
fist (the Hand of PI gets ready to fight)
open (ready for a ‘high five’)
finger (well…  this will be the most tweeted command)”

 Gregor “G-Man” Hanuschak sent in a tip about a fun looking project called the Smack Attack, which is a Steering Wheel Drum Kit (might be a product soon). You can now play along with the tunes in your car! The Kickstarter will go live very soon and has a goal of $200,000. With a product price of $150 and a early bird Kickstarter price of $99 I am thinking there might be enough interest to make this thing a go?

“The tag line is, “Smack Attack: The drum set for your steering wheel”. Fight highway hypnosis and hit your steering wheel to add drum sounds to the music you’re listening to in your car. Music and your drumming can be wirelessly sent to your stereo and played over your existing car speakers.

The product that lets you do this is called “Re-Inventing The Wheel” (or RITW for short) and is being presented by the company “Smack Attack Corporation”. A feature-rich product, you can play drums with any song in your iPhone’s music library, play along with drum karaoke (music with no drums, hence you become the only drummer), change the 8 drum sounds produced by your steering wheel to any sounds you want (including the sound of Chewbacca or homemade sounds like the sound of your pet dog: http://ritwsmackattack.com/dog_sounds.html), record your drum performances and post to the web, or even let other passengers in the car drum along with you by hitting touchscreen buttons on the iPhone app.

There’s no installation required, the cover fits on any steering wheel, and operation is completely wireless. RITW currently only works with iPhones, but an Android version will likely be forthcoming (as will be one for non-smart phone users). Kickstarter funding is being requested to make the shift from working prototypes to mass production and actual products are being offered as rewards to Kickstarter backers.”

Guitar tuners are quite common these days. Only problem is that they use displays or LEDs to indicate how the tuning process is going. Sam from J44 Industries made a guitar tuner that a blind person can use for a charity called Remap. His design starts with an off the shelf guitar tuner, only problem with this one is that it used LEDs for visual feedback. He used an arduino to monitor the state of the LEDs and generated audio feedback using an earbud for the user to hear the process. He has some smart audio cues that lets the person know when they are getting close to having the string tuned so that you can adjust the amount of peg turn accordingly.

Check out these 3D Printed Speakers, they have been printed with 2 different materials. This allows the design to have something that resembles a ton of square light pipes. With some addressable LEDs on the inside it sure puts on a show!

 ”These speakers are composed of two components that are 3D printed simultaneously:
1. Flexible rubber base (Objet TangoBlackPlus)
2. Clear crystal-like protrusions (Objet VeroClear)

The clear crystals are held in place by the rubber base, which helps to reduce the resonance in the case from the speaker. To create the crystal form, I used Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2013, and its powerful Topology toolbox. “

If you are looking to get into 3D printing have a look at this DeltaMaker – A Delta Robot 3D Printer. Their Kickstarter was successful so it will just be a matter of time until these units are rolling off the production floor!

Via: Make

 ”Product Hightlights:

• Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) using 1.75 mm filament – PLA and ABS
• 100 micron layer resolution capability 
• 10″ diameter x 11″ tall build envelope (approximate)
• Heated build platform (optional)
• Efficient footprint to build envelope ratio
• Printed object viewable from 360 degrees
• Rigid aluminum extrusion construction
• Utilizes open source software tool chain (Marlin, Slic3r, and Repetier Host)”

Our friend Dave from Plastibots has just completed this great looking Bluetooth Robot that has an IP Camera on board. Dave wrote an Android application called BT Bot Control to allow you to drive your robot around using commands over Bluetooth using your Android phone. The video from the camera is sent back using Wifi. I can just imagine how much fun this would be with a squirt gun connected! Connect either a powerful solenoid or a servo to squirt the target when you have them in your sights. Might need some larger motors to get the speed you would need to quickly drive away before the person you squirted tosses the bot in the pool though.

We have all see some complex home automation systems, this video made by Jeremy from The Custom Geek gives a good overview of what is involved behind the scenes. This system lives in the garage and interfaces audio, video, phone, intercom, lighting and alarm system. Since the system is all connected it can do things like mute your pounding music when the door bell rings. Jeremy is also making custom hardware like this RGBW LED Controller to add to the capabilities of automation systems.