Hans Scharler has been busy making a DIY Steampunk Pumpkin that is sure to please anyone who sees it. He squished tons of parts in there from some of the best DIY providers. His own ioBridge, some sensors from Adafruit, some ThingM (designed by Tod Kurt) parts from Sparkfun.

"Using the ioBridge IO-204, I rigged up the fog machine to trigger when someone walked in front of the pumpkin. I used a passive infrared sensor from Adafruit to detect motion. The IO-204 has an upcoming feature that allows for on board logic, meaning you can break off of the Internet and have local controls take over. To integrate it with the fog machine, I tapped into the wireless remote control that came with the fog machine. This made it easy to control using a single relay. To light the pumpkin, I bought a BlinkM RGB LED Blaster from Sparkfun. The LEDs are high intensity lights that you can mix colors together."

Not exactly sure how much plastic hose was used to make this cool sculpture but it is probably at least 100 feet. If you are going to the Maker Fair in San Mateo look for this water sculpture to be on display.

Via: Digg

Why go to all the trouble of dialing the phone to order a pizza. Now you can Order Dominos Pizza via Command Line. Looks like this can’t work here in Canada though.  :(  I think it would be cool to setup a crontab to automatically order a pizza for you on a schedule. I can just imagine when this catches on and you call to ask a question about available toppings, they will suggest you have a look at the man page.

"Pizza Party is a free text based software package for ordering pizza, or for throwing pizza parties. Pizza Party has many features to make ordering pizza easy:

• Can order pizza with only a few keystrokes.
• Can save pizza preferences.
• Can use batch files for ordering many pizzas.
• Has easy to use flags for ordering different toppings.
• Runs on most UNIX-like operating systems.
• Supports most currently popular topings like "mushrooms", and "pepperoni"!
• Unattended / background operation.
• Pizza Party is distributed under the GNU General Public License."

Via: Digg

If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone you can now use it as a cool new computer interface! Have a look at TouchpadPro for more details.

"Touchpad Pro lets you control your PC or Mac through your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s got multi-touch capabilities just like the new MacBooks, though without the cost It’s got all the features you asked for, including landscape mode, multi-touch zoom, scroll, right-click, and much more.

Installation instructions:

1. You need a jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch with Installer.app on it. Here are some great instructions on how to do this.
2. Start Installer and click on the Install button. Go to Utilities. Touchpad Pro should already be there.
   • If it isn’t, go to Sources, and then add Community Sources. Touchpad Pro should definitely be there now.
3. Follow these instructions on how to set up VNC on the machine you want to control and connect to it."

Via: Digg

Shaking hands with this glove could be a shocking experience! Looks like the stun guns we see today had some interesting beginnings.

"MORE punch than can be found in a box-glove is contained in a new electric glove invented by Cirilo Diaz of Cuba for use by police while handling rough characters or in quelling riots. Persons contacted by an officer wearing the glove receive a 1,500-volt shock, sufficient to remove all traces of fight. A half-pound battery worn on the belt supplies the power, all wiring being concealed beneath the coat."

Via: Digg

Apple wanted the iPhone to be a closed system. With a bit of creative coding that has all changed. If you want to play some NES games, all you need is a iPhone and you are good to go! Have a look at the Google Code page for the iPhone NES Emulator for more details.

Video after the jump.

“A native NES emulator for the iPhone, currently using the InfoNES core. Presently there is no sound, and the emulator is a little slow (most likely due to the way I’m drawing onto the screen). And the control is a bit iffy (using an image of an actual controller, while cute, sucks).

ROMs need to be placed in /var/root/Media/ROMs/NES ”

Via: Tuaw and Digg

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Check out this Computer Controlled Room Ambilight Controller that Mike built. I didn’t realize that there was an open source program that would perform the same screen analysis as the Phillips Ambilight system, this gives me some ideas…

Video after the jump.

“What it basically does is, it waits for info from the PC through the RS232 interface and then controlls the brightness of the different collors. I then wrote a programm which sends bytes to the cotroller depending on where the mouse is positioned on the color triangle.

The second program is a opensource program called BobLight (http://www.xs4all.nl/~loosen/elektron… ). it looks at the screen and then sends the dominant colors through the comport. I modified it a little so it would only look at the top left corner of the screen. the I made a plugin for winamp that produces plain colors depending on the beat of the music. That’s about it. then I made some LEDclusters and strips and mounted them in my room.
Thats what I’m doin right now. I haveto wire more strips to put them all over my room.

Oh yeah the Programm also works when whatching movies, which then turns my whole room into one big ambilight :)”

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